Feminist Reflections on the History of Philosophy (The New Synthese Historical Library)

FEMINIST REFLECTIONS ON THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY The New Synthese Historical Library Texts and Studies in the History...

Author: LILLI ALANEN | CHARLOTTE WITT (Editors)

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FEMINIST REFLECTIONS ON THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY

The New Synthese Historical Library Texts and Studies in the History of Philosophy VOLUME 55

Managing Editor: SIMO KNUUTTILA, University of Helsinki

Associate Editors: DANIEL ELLIOT GARBER, University of Chicago RICHARD SORABJI, University of London

Editorial Consultants: JAN A. AERTSEN, Thomas-Institut, Universität zu Köln ROGER ARIEW, Virginia Polytechnic Institute E. JENNIFER ASHWORTH, University of Waterloo MICHAEL AYERS, Wadham College, Oxford GAIL FINE, Cornell University R. J. HANKINSON, University of Texas JAAKKO HINTIKKA, Boston University PAUL HOFFMAN, University of California, Riverside DAVID KONSTAN, Brown University RICHARD H. KRAUT, Northwestern University, Evanston ALAIN DE LIBERA, Université de Genève JOHN E. MURDOCH, Harvard University DAVID FATE NORTON, McGill University LUCA OBERTELLO, Università degli Studi di Genova ELEONORE STUMP, St. Louis University ALLEN WOOD, Stanford University

The titles published in this series are listed at the end of this volume.

FEMINIST REFLECTIONS ON THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Edited by LILLI ALANEN University of Uppsala, Sweden

and

CHARLOTTE WITT University of New Hampshire, Durham, U.S.A.

KLUWER ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS NEW YORK, BOSTON, DORDRECHT, LONDON, MOSCOW

eBook ISBN: Print ISBN:

1-4020-2489-4 1-4020-2488-6

©2005 Springer Science + Business Media, Inc. Print ©2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers Dordrecht All rights reserved No part of this eBook may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording, or otherwise, without written consent from the Publisher Created in the United States of America

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

vii

CHARLOTTE WITT, PREFACE

xi

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS CHARLOTTE WITT, Feminist History of Philosophy

xvii 1

KRISTIN SAMPSON, Identity and Gender in Plato

17

CYNTHIA FREELAND, Schemes and Scenes of Reading the Timaeus

33

SIGRIDUR THORGEIRSDOTTIR, Nietzsche’s Feminization of Metaphysics and its Significance for Theories of Gender Difference

51

MARTINA REUTER, Psychologizing Cartesian Doubt: Feminist Reading Strategies and the “Unthought” of Philosophy

69

ROBIN MAY SCHOTT, Feminist Rationality Debates: Rereading Kant

101

CHARLOTTE WITT, Form, Normativity and Gender in Aristotle: A Feminist Perspective

117

SARA HEINÄMAA, The Soul-Body Union and Sexual Difference: From Descartes to Merleau-Ponty and Beauvoir

137

ANNE J. JACOBSON, The Psychology of Philosophy: Interpreting Locke and Hume

153

DON GARRETT, Hume as a Man of Reason and Woman’s Philosopher

171

LILLI ALANEN, Descartes and Elisabeth: A Philosophical Dialogue?

193

LISA SHAPIRO, Some Thoughts on the Place of Women in Early Modern Philosophy

219


LILLI ALANEN is Professor of Philosophy at Uppsala University. Her current research interests are in early modern philosophy, philosophy of mind, moral philosophy and psychology. She is co-editor of Commonality and Particularity in Ethics (1997), author of Descartes’s Concept of Mind (2003), and of numerous articles on early modern philosophy and other topics. CYNTHIA FREELAND is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Houston. Her research interests include ancient philosophy, feminist theory, and aesthetics. She is editor of Feminist Interpretations of Aristotle (1998) and author of But Is It Art? (2001). DON GARRETT is Kenan Distinguished Professor for Teaching Excellence at the University of Norther Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of Cognition and Commitment in Hume’s Philosophy (1997) and the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza (1996). He has served as co-editor of Hume Studies and is currently the North American editor of Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie. SARA HEINÄMAA is a NOS-H researcher and senior lecturer in theoretical philosophy at the University of Helsinki. She is also professor of humanist women’s studies at the Centre for Women’s Studies and Gender Research at the University of Oslo. She has published several books on phenomenology and existentialist philosophy, explicating the problems of embodiment, perception, emotions, and sexual difference. Her main focus is in the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, but she also works on Descartes, Husserl, Fink, and feminist philosophy, from Beauvoir to Irigaray. Her latest publication is Toward a Phenomenology of Sexual Difference: Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir (2003). ANNE JAAP JACOBSON is Professor of Philosophy and Engineering at the University of Houston, where she is also associate director of the Center for Neuro-Engineering and Cognitive Science. She works on cognitive science, feminist theory and the history of philosophy. vii

viii


MARTINA REUTER works as a researcher at the Academy of Finland, and teaches philosophy and women studies at the universities of Helsinki and Uppsala. She received her Ph.d. at the University of Helsinki in 2000 with a dissertation on feminist critiques of Descartes philosophy and has published articles on Descartes, feminism and phenomenology. Her current research concerns the role of the passions, reason and the will in Mary Wollstonecraft’s philosophical thought. KRISTIN SAMPSON is a research fellow at the University of Bergen. She is involved in the project “The Gonias of Plato. Metaphors of birth in the Timaeus and the Parmenides.” She received her Cand. Philol. in Philosophy in 1994 with the thesis Selvets logikk i Platons Faidon. En kritikk av motsetningsparet kropp-sjel, dødelig-udødelig og kvinnelig mannlig. Her research interests include ancient philosophy and feminst philosophy. ROBIN MAY SCHOTT is Senior Researcher at the Danish Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities during 2003-4. She is Associate Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of Copenhagen, where she directs the NOS-H project, “Sexuality, Death and the Feminine”. She is the author of Discovering Feminist Philosophy; Knowledge, Ethics, Politics (2003) and of Cognition and Eros; A Critique of the Kantian Paradigm (1988/93). She is the editor of the special issue of Hypatia on Feminist Philosophy and the Problem of Evil (winter and spring 2003), of Feminist Interpretatations of Immanuel Kant (1997) and co-editor of Forplantning, Køn og Teknologi (1995). Her current research deals with the problem of evil in relation to the phenomenon of war rape. LISA SHAPIRO is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Simon Fraser University outside of Vancouver. Her research interests include early modern philosophy, with particular interests in philosophy of mind and theories of the passions, as well as feminist philosophy. She is working on a new translation of Elisabeth of Bohemia’s correspondence with Descartes. SIGRIDUR THORGEIRSDOTTIR is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iceland in Reykjavik. She has published on topics in the philosophy of Nietzsche, feminist philosophy and social philosophy. Her book Vis creativa. Kunst und Wahrheit in der Philosophie Friedrich Nietzsches was published in 1996. She has co-edited an anthology on family and justice and another one on the work of Simone de Beauvoir that were published in Iceland. Her collection of papers in feminist philosophy came out in 2001. Currently she is working on themes at the intersection of feminist philosophy and bioethics.


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CHARLOTTE WITT is Professor of Philosophy, and Chair, at the Unversity of New Hampshire. Her research interests are in ancient philosophy, metaphysics and feminist theory. She is the author of Substance and Essence in Aristotle (1989) and co-editor of A Mind of One’s Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity (1992, edition, 2001).

PREFACE

Charlotte Witt (University of New Hampshire, U.S.A.)

Feminist history of philosophy has come of age as a distinct approach to the history of philosophy. It is now possible to reflect upon the different kinds scholarship called ‘feminist history of philosophy’ and to raise important questions about its method(s) and purpose(s). It is also possible to enrich our understanding of the complexity of historical interpretation inspired by the work of feminist historians. It is even possible for a new generation of feminist historians to think critically about the work of an earlier generation. The papers in this volume contribute to the task of thinking about the different kinds of contributions made by feminist work in the history of philosophy, and the extent to which feminist interpretations of historical texts constitute a distinctive method of reading the history of philosophy. Some of the papers in this volume were first presented at a conference titled “Reconsidering the Canon: Feminist Interpretations of the History of Philosophy ” held at the University of Uppsala. Although the papers were diverse in philosophical orientation and historical period, the discussion returned again and again to the question of method: Is there a distinctively feminist approach to reading the history of philosophy? What makes it a feminist approach? Is it a matter of the questions that are brought to a philosophical text, or is the question of how to interpret the meaning of a historical text also at issue? In what ways have feminist interpretations contributed to our understanding of canonical figures in the history of philosophy, or altered our understanding of that history? We decided to continue the conversation by inviting feminist historians of philosophy to think further about these questions in relation to their own work in the history of philosophy, and in relation to the work of others. xi L. Alanen and C. Witt (eds.), Feminist Reflections on the History of Philosophy, xi-xv. © 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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PREFACE

In “Feminist History of Philosophy” Charlotte Witt surveys the wide range of purposes, methods and accomplishments that constitute feminist history of philosophy today. She shows that feminist historians of philosophy have contributed to the history of philosophy in at least three distinct ways, and she poses the question of what unifies these apparently diverse contributions. Her thesis is that much of the diversity in feminist readings of the history of philosophy can be traced to ongoing debates over the method(s) and purpose(s) of contemporary feminist philosophy. One issue highlighted by feminist work in the history of philosophy concerns the important role played by metaphor and images in philosophical writing. Several contributors to this volume discuss how gender images and metaphors figure and operate in philosophical theory. In “Identity and Gender in Plato” Kristin Sampson explores the way in which gender and the feminine work in Plato’s later dialogues to illuminate his views on the relationship between eternal ideas and the realm of sense perception, and his discussion of the One and the Other. In “Schemes and Scenes of Reading the TIMAEUS” Cynthia Freeland reflects critically upon the interpretations of leading feminist thinkers like Irigaray and Butler, arguing that their readings of the text are too partial and simplistic. Freeland offers a careful analysis of many of Plato’s metaphors, which provides a more adequate context for the interpretation of gender metaphors in the Timaeus. Sigridur Thorgeirsdottir, in “Nietzsche’s Feminization of Metaphysics and its Significance for Theories of Gender Difference” reflects upon feminist critics and feminist advocates of Nietzsche’s metaphysics, providing a complex and nuanced discussion of both his overt misogyny, and the central role of the feminine and female figures in his later writing. Feminist historians of philosophy have also paid particular attention to traditional characterizations of reason and objectivity inspired, in part, by Genevieve Lloyd’s feminist classic The Man of Reason and Susan Bordo’s The Flight to Objectivity.1 Several of our contributors address feminist interpretations of reason in the philosophical tradition, focusing both on the complex question of the value of certain conceptions of reason for feminist thinking, and on the hermeneutic assumptions underlying the now classic approaches of Lloyd and Bordo. In “Psychologizing Cartesian Doubt: Feminist Reading Strategies and the ‘Unthought of Philosophy’” Martina Reuter critically examines Bordo’s strategy of reading Descartes’ philosophy, which tries to uncover the psychocultural assumptions and motivations that are unarticulated presuppositions of the text. Robin Schott’s “Feminist Rationality Debates: Rereading Kant” emphasizes the importance of methodological issues within feminist history of philosophy

PREFACE

xiii

such as the question of whether or not a philosophical text is autonomous from the historical and social (and perhaps psychological) conditions of its production. Schott presents three feminist interpretations of Kant on reason, which differ as a consequence of the philosophical orientations of its author, but are united by a feminist commitment to emancipation. Feminist philosophers have also influenced the history of philosophy by appropriating its ideas for contemporary feminist purposes. Charlotte Witt provides an interpretation of Aristotle’s hylomorphic metaphysics, which explains the intrinsic normativity of Aristotle’s theory of nature and the way in which gender and sexual difference become associated with natural norms. Her paper “Form, Normativity and Gender in Aristotle: A Feminist Perspective” argues further that the idea that nature is intrinsically normative might be of use to feminist philosophers thinking about ecology and value. In her paper “The Soul-Body Union and Sexual Difference: From Descartes to Merleau-Ponty and Beauvoir” Sara Heinämaa finds surprising resources in Descartes’ metaphysics for feminist thinking about sexual difference, and she traces this interpretation of Descartes to MerleauPonty and Simone de Beauvoir. Anne J. Jacobson’s “The Psychology of Philosophy: Interpreting Locke and Hume” urges that we interpret historical texts as bearing the marks of their origins as the products of human activity rather than as precursors of a contemporary philosophical theory or view. Read in this way, she argues further, certain texts of Locke and Hume are of great interest to feminist philosophers. In “Hume as a Man of Reason and Woman’s Philosopher” Don Garrett critically assesses several feminist interpretations of Hume’s concept of reason, and then explains why attributing a purely instrumental view of reason to Hume is the best interpretation both of Hume’s texts, and for feminist purposes. Feminist historians of philosophy have also made a significant contribution to our understanding of the history of our discipline by trying to set the record straight. In A History of Women Philosophers Mary Ellen Waithe has documented at least 16 women philosophers in the classical world, 17 women philosophers from 500-1600, and over 30 from 16001900.2 Yet, The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, published in 1967, which contains articles on over 900 philosophers, does not include an entry for either Elizabeth of Bohemia or Damaris, Lady Masham. In the 1995 Supplement, they are mentioned in an entry, ambiguously titled “Women in the History of Philosophy”. By 1998, each merits her own entry in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. In this area the achievement of feminist historians of philosophy is clear and important. Yet, there remain difficult questions about how to integrate women philosophers into the philosophy curriculum, and into the on-going historical conversation.

xiv

PREFACE

Ironically enough, the slow process of inclusion of women into the history of philosophy has met with resistance, and this resistance has suggested important questions about the nature of philosophy both today and in the past. The question: What does a woman thinker have to do or to be to count as a philosopher? requires us to reflect upon both what philosophy is and what it has been in the past. In “Descartes and Elizabeth: A Philosophical Dialogue?” Lilli Alanen makes the case for considering Elizabeth of Bohemia a genuine philosopher, who engaged in a very significant philosophical correspondence with Descartes. Criticizing Daniel Garber’s characterization of Elizabeth as a “learned maid” and not a philosopher, Alanen discusses what philosophy is and how Elizabeth’s correspondence with Descartes satisfies any reasonable conception of philosophical exchange. Lisa Shapiro’s “Some Thoughts on Early Modern Philosophy ” reflects upon the remarkable flowering of interest and work on women philosophers of this period. Shapiro, like Alanen, addresses the problem of how to integrate these newly “discovered” women philosophers into the historical narrative of philosophy. She proposes a conversational model of philosophy and the history of philosophy, on the grounds that all good conversations benefit from inclusion of viewpoint and alternatives, and suffer from their exclusion. What are we doing when we read historical texts as feminists? The papers in this collection supply a wide range of answers to this question. Feminists read philosophical texts with a special interest in the roles played by metaphors of gender or feminine figures. And feminist attention to metaphors and figures raises the methodological question of the role of metaphor in both historical and contemporary philosophical writing. Feminist historians of philosophy raise questions about the autonomy of philosophical writing. Should a text be viewed as produced by human activity within a specific set of social and historical (and perhaps psychological) conditions? Or should a philosophical text be interpreted as far a possible as autonomous, and as having an internal logic and context? Is feminist history of philosophy defined by any one of these interpretative assumptions, or is it wrong to consider the feminist approach a distinctive method at all? Perhaps what unifies feminist approaches to the history of philosophy is not any particular methodological assumption about interpreting historical texts, but rather a commitment to emancipatory projects, and to finding a philosophical vocabulary that can contribute to those projects? The papers in this collection raise these important methodological questions concerning feminist history of philosophy, while at the same time making significant contributions to the genre itself.

PREFACE

xv

NOTES 1 The Man of Reason: “Male” and “Female” in Western Philosophy by Genevieve Lloyd (University of Minnesota Press, 1985). The Flight to Objectivity: Essays on Cartesianism and Culture (State University of New York Press, 1987). 2 A History of Women Philosophers, Vol. 1-4 , edited by Mary Ellen Waithe (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994).

REFERENCES Bordo, Susan. The Flight to Objectivity: Essays on Cartesianism and Culture. New York: State University of New Yourk Press, 1987. Lloyd, Genevieve. The Man of Reason: “Male” and “Female” in Western Philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985. Waithe, Mary Ellen. A History of Women Philosophers, Vol. 1-4. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The editors would like to thank Professor Krister Segerberg for his help in organizing the conference that led to this volume, and for his support of our book project. Charlotte Witt is additionally grateful to Professor Segerberg for inviting her to give a talk on feminist history of philosophy at the University of Uppsala, which was an important event in the process that led to this volume. We would also like to thank the participants at the Reconsidering the Canon: Feminist Work on the History of Philosophy Conference at Uppsala University for their thoughtful papers and lively discussion. We are both deeply grateful to Rysiek Sliwinski for his work editing and preparing this manuscript for publication.

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FEMINIST HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY


The past two decades have seen an explosion of feminist writing on the philosophical canon, a development that has clear parallels in other disciplines like literature and art history. Since most of the writing is, in one way or another, critical of the tradition, a natural question to ask is: Why does the history of philosophy have importance for feminist philosophers? This question assumes that the history of philosophy is of importance for feminists, an assumption that is warranted by the sheer volume of recent feminist writing on the canon. This essay explores the different ways that feminist philosophers are interacting with the Western philosophical tradition. Feminist philosophers engaged in a project of re-reading and re-forming the philosophical canon have noticed two significant areas of concern. The first is the problem of historical exclusion. Feminist philosophers are faced with a tradition that believes that there are no women philosophers and, if there are any, they are unimportant. Of course, women are not entirely absent from the history of philosophy, and that brings us to the second challenge we face. Canonical philosophers have had plenty to say about women and what we are like. In general terms, we often find that philosophical norms like reason and objectivity are defined in contrast to matter, the irrational or whatever a given philosopher associates with women and the feminine. Our tradition tells us, either implicitly through images and metaphors, or explicitly in so many words, that philosophy itself, and its norms of reason and objectivity, exclude everything that is feminine or associated with women. In response, feminist philosophers have criticized both the historical exclusion of women from the philosophical tradition, and the negative 1 L. Alanen and C. Witt (eds.), Feminist Reflections on the History of Philosophy, 1-15. © 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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characterization of women or the feminine in it. Feminist historians of philosophy have argued that the historical record is incomplete because it omits women philosophers, and it is biased because it devalues any women philosophers it forgot to omit. In addition, feminist philosophers have argued that the philosophical tradition is conceptually flawed because of the way that its fundamental norms like reason and objectivity are gendered male.1 By means of these criticisms, feminist philosophers are enlarging the philosophical canon and re-evaluating its norms, in order to include women in the philosophical “us”. Section 1) Feminist Criticisms of the Canon as Misogynist, describes feminist readings of the philosophical canon that challenge its derogatory characterizations of women. These are of three kinds: (a) readings that record the explicit misogyny of great philosophers (like Aristotle’s description of a female as a deformed male); (b) readings that argue for gendered interpretations of theoretical concepts (like matter and form in Aristotle); (c) synoptic interpretations of the canon (like the view that, historically, reason and objectivity are gendered male). The third category of feminist criticisms of the canon diagnoses where philosophy as a whole went most deeply wrong, and, in doing so, it constructs a negative canon of philosophy. The negative canon exposes the ways in which the views of canonical philosophers throughout the history of philosophy are explicitly or implicitly misogynist or sexist. Section 2) Feminist Revisions of the History of Philosophy discusses the response of feminist philosophy to the myths that there are no women philosophers and, in any case, no important ones. One response has been the retrieval of women philosophers for the historical record. A related development is the elevation to the canon of women philosophers like Mary Wollstonecraft, Hannah Arendt and Simone de Beauvoir. Section 3) Feminist Appropriation of Canonical Philosophers examines the way that feminist philosophers have been engaged in rereading the canon looking for antecedents to feminist philosophy in the work of those philosophers (e.g. Hume) and those theories (e.g. Arisotle’s virtue ethics) that are most congenial to current trends in feminism or which provide most fuel for feminist thought. This is to use the canon as other movements have done—as a resource, and as confirmation that a feminist perspective or problem is securely rooted in our philosophical culture.


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1. FEMINIST CRITICISMS OF THE CANON AS MISOGYNIST “Women are capable of education, but they are not made for activities which demand a universal faculty such as the more advanced sciences, philosophy and certain forms of artistic production.... Women regulate their actions not by the demands of universality, but by arbitrary inclinations and opinions.” G.W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Right2

The idea that the gender of philosophers is important or even relevant to their work is a thought that runs counter to the self-image of philosophy. So, it is interesting to explore how and why feminist philosophers came to the realization that gender is a useful analytic category to apply to the history of philosophy. We can distinguish two aspects to this process although, in many cases, the two aspects merge into a single project. The first stage of realizing the importance of gender consisted of the cataloguing of the explicit misogyny of most of the canon. The second stage consisted of probing the theories of canonical philosophers in order to uncover the gender bias lurking in their supposedly universal theories. The second stage, the discovery that a philosopher’s supposedly universal and objective theories were gender specific, raised the further question of whether or not the theoretical gender bias was intrinsic to the theory or extrinsic to it. Let me illustrate these points with Aristotle. 1.1 Explicit Statements of Misogyny in Philosophical Texts There is no doubt that Aristotle’s texts are misogynist; he thought that women were inferior to men and he said so explicitly. For example, to cite Cynthia Freeland’s catalogue: “Aristotle says that the courage of a man lies in commanding, a woman’s lies in obeying; that “matter yearns for form, as the female for the male and the ugly for the beautiful;” that women have fewer teeth than men; that a female is an incomplete male or ”as it were, a deformity”: which contributes only matter and not form to the generation of offspring; that in general “a woman is perhaps an inferior being”; that female characters in a tragedy will be inappropriate if they are too brave or too clever.”3 However dispiriting or annoying this litany is, and whatever problems it presents to a woman studying or teaching Aristotle, it can be argued that Aristotle simply held a mistaken view about women and their

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capacities (as did most Athenians of his time). But, if this is so, then Aristotle’s theories, or most of them, are not tarnished by his statements about women, and we can ignore them, since they are false. I have chosen Aristotle as my example, but similar feminist critiques are available chronicling the explicit misogyny of other canonical figures like Plato and Kant. Feminist criticisms of Plato’s theories stress dialogues (like the Timaeus and Laws) that characterize women as inferior to men rather than the egalitarian Republic. Kant’s writings, like Aristotle’s, provide the ideal target for feminist criticism because they contain both overt statements of sexism and racism, and a theoretical framework that can be interpreted along gender lines.4 1.2 Gendered Interpretations of Philosophical Concepts If we consider Aristotle’s theory of hylomorphism we find a connection between form and being male, and matter and being female. That is, we find that matter and form are gendered notions in Aristotle.5 By a gendered notion I mean a notion that is connected either overtly or covertly, either explicitly or metaphorically with gender or sexual difference.6 Furthermore, matter and form are not equal partners in Aristotle’s metaphysics; form is better than matter. And since hylomorphism is the conceptual framework that underlies most of Aristotelian theory from metaphysics and philosophy of mind to biology and literary theory, it looks as if his supposedly universal and objective theories are gendered, and it looks as if his negative charactization of women tarnishes his philosophical theories. Are Aristotle’s theories intrinsically gendered and sexist, so that gender cannot be removed without altering the theories themselves? Several feminist philosophers have developed this thesis. For example, in “Woman Is Not a Rational Animal”, Lynda Lange argues that Aristotle’s theory of sex difference is implicated in every piece of Aristotle’s metaphysical jargon, and she concludes that “it is not at all clear that it [Aristotle’s theory of sex difference] can simply be cut away without any reflection on the status of the rest of the philosophy.”7 Elizabeth Spelman has argued that Aristotle’s politicized metaphysics is reflected in his theory of soul, which, in turn, is used to justify the subordination of women in the Politics.8 And, finally, Susan Okin has argued that Aristotle’s functionalist theory of form was devised by Aristotle in order to legitimate the political status quo in Athens including slavery and the inequality of women.9 If these scholars are right, then Aristotle’s theories are intrinsically biased against women, and it is unlikely that they can have any value for


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feminists beyond the project of learning about the ways in which the philosophical tradition has devalued women. Alternatively, I have argued that the suspect gender associations with Aristotelian matter and form are extrinsic to these concepts, and therefore removable from Aristotle’s theories without substantially altering them.10 The argument that Aristotle’s gender associations are not intrinsic to his concepts of matter (female) and form (male) turns on the incompatibility of the position that matter is intrinsically female, and form intrinsically male with the position that every composite substance is a unity of matter and form. If every composite substance is a complex of matter and form, then each would be a hermaphrodite, rather than a male or a female as is the case with animals. Moreoever,whatever plausibility gender associations with matter and form might have with regard to animals, is lost entirely when we consider artifacts, like shoes and beds. If intrinsic gender associations with matter and form are incompatible with Aristotle’s theory of substance and extrinsic gender associations are compatible with that theory, then the principle of charity dictates that we opt for the consistent interpretation. Sometimes, as in the case of Descartes, the feminist argument in favor of a gendered theory is subtle since, unlike Aristotle, he expresses both a personal and a theoretical committment to equality. Further, his theories are not stated using gendered notions. Yet, some feminists have argued that his theory of mind-body dualism, and his abstract characterization of reason resonate with gender implications— on the assumption that women are emotional and bodily creatures.11 1.3 Synoptic Interpretations of the Philosophical Canon The philosophical canon can allow the luster some of its members to be tarnished by feminist criticism, just as it has weathered criticisms from analytic or continental perspectives. The most radical feminist critics, however, have urged that the canon’s central philosophical norms and values, like reason and objectivity, are gendered notions. The synoptic approch considers the Western philosophical tradition as a whole, and argues that its core concepts are gendered male. But, if this is so, then the Western philosophical tradition as a whole, and the central concepts that we have inherited from it, requires critical scrutiny by feminists. Moreover, philosophy’s self-image as universal and objective, rather than particular and biased, is mistaken. Feminist synoptic interpretations of the canon take several forms. The first, exemplified by Genevieve Lloyd’s Man of Reason, argues that reason

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and objectivity in the history of philosophy are gendered male.12 The way that reason and objectivity are gendered male varies as philosophical theory and historical period varies, but the fact that they are gendered is a constant. From Aristotle to Hume, from Plato to Sartre, reason is associated with maleness. Therefore, the notion of reason that we have inherited, whether we are empiricists or existentialists, requires critical scrutiny. The second form of synoptic interpretation, exemplified by Susan Bordo’s The Flight to Objectivity, argues that the modern period in philosophy, and, in particular, the philosophy of Descartes, is the source of our ideals of reason and objectivity that are gendered male. In other words, this story chronicles a turn in philosophy coincident with the rise of modern science, which generated ideals of reason and objectivity that are deeply antagonistic to women and feminism.13 Cartesian rationalism and the norms of modern science mark a decisive break with a philosophical and cultural tradition that was more accommodating of female characteristics and powers. It is important to note that Lloyd and Bordo differ not only with regard to the historical story they tell concerning the maleness of reason, but also with regard to the way they understand that maleness. For Lloyd, the maleness of reason is symbolic and metaphorical rather than cultural or psychological. Lloyd does not intend the maleness of reason to refer to either a socially constituted gender category or a psychological orientation shared by males. “This book is not a direct study of gender identity. It seeks rather to contribute to the understanding of how the male-female distinction operates as a symbol in traditional philosophical texts, and of its interactions with explicit philosophical views of reason”.14 In understanding the maleness of reason as symbolic rather than as psychological or social, Lloyd avoids making a theoretical committment to any particular psychology of sex differences or any particular account of the social formation of gender identity. What she gains in flexibility, however, she loses in content, since it is difficult to specify exactly what metaphorical maleness is, and how it is related to psychological or social maleness. Other feminists have attempted to develop an account of how male metaphors and symbols undermine philosophical arguments.15 For Bordo, however, the maleness of Cartesian reason is given both a social meaning and a psychological content. First, the social meaning of maleness: “In the seventeenth century it [the feminine orientation toward the world] was decisively purged from the dominant intellectual culture, through the Cartesian ‘rebirthing’ and restructuring of knowledge and the world as masculine.” 16 This social meaning is paired with a psychological consequence: “The ‘great Cartesian anxiety,’ although manifestly


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expresssed in epistemological terms, discloses itself as anxiety over separation from the organic female universe.”17 Cartesian ‘anxiety’ is separation anxiety from mother nature; the rational norms of clarity and distinctness are read as symptoms of this anxiety.18 Bordo’s socialpsychological notion of maleness while rich and explicit, provides a large target for critics because it is based on a controversial historical thesis (that the 17th century showed a marked increase in gynophobia) and a disputed psychological theory of the family (Object Relations Theory). Luce Irigaray takes a radical stance towards the history of philosophy by trying to indicate what is suppressed and hidden in the tradition rather than cataloguing its evident “maleness”. Her work, like Bordo’s, makes use of psychoanalytic theory in interpreting texts and, like Lloyd’s, it explores the symbolic associations of philosophical images and concepts. However, unlike Bordo and Lloyd, Irigaray uses highly unconventional methods of interpreting canonical philosophical texts in order to uncover the ways in which the feminine or sexual difference is repressed in them. For example, Irigaray uses humor and parody rather than straightforward exegesis, and she points to instabilities (contraditions) in philosophical texts as symptoms of patriarchal thinking. According to Irigaray, patriarchal thinking attempts to achieve universality by repressing sexual difference. But, the presence of contradictions or instabilities in a philosophical text is symptomatic of the failure of patriarchal thinking to contain sexual difference. For example, Irigaray might look at the argument I described above for considering gender associations with form and matter in Aristotle to be extrinsic, rather than intrinsic, to those concepts, and argue that the fact that Aristotle’s hylomorphism as a universal theory is incompatible with gender associations is a symptom of patriarchal thinking rather than evidence that the proposed interpretation is mistaken.19 Despite their different historical stories, and the different ways that they understand the maleness of reason, each of these panoramic visions of the history of philosophy deliver the same moral, which is that the central norms that inform our philosophical culture today are gendered male.20 Hence, these synoptic narratives of the philosophical tradition provide historical justifications for feminist philosophers who are critical of our central philosophical norms of reason and objectivity. Does the feminist synoptic critical reading of the history of philosophy justify either the conclusion that traditional conceptions of reason ought to be flat-out rejected by feminists or the conclusion that traditional conceptions of reason ought to be subjected to critical scrutiny? Even if feminist historical arguments are successful in showing that philosophical norms like reason and objectivity are gendered male, this

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conclusion does not justify a flat-out rejection of either traditional philosophy or its norms of reason and objectivity.21 Recall the distinction introduced above between intrinsically and extrinsically gendered notions. An intrinsically gendered notion is one that necessarily carries implications regarding gender, i.e., if one were to cancel all implications concerning gender, one would be left with a different notion than the original. In contrast, an extrinsically gendered notion typically does carry implications concerning gender, but not necessarily so. If the maleness of reason is extrinsic to the traditional concept of reason, then the historical fact that it was a gendered notion does not justify or require its rejection by feminists. If on the other hand, it can be shown that the maleness of reason is intrinsic to it, it still does not follow that reason ought to be rejected by feminists. For, the idea the reason is intrinsically male-biased would justify a rejection of it only if it ought to be other than it is. So, what needs to be argued is that reason and objectivity would be different, and better, if they were not gendered male, but were gender-neutral, gender-inclusive or female. But, if feminist philosophers develop this argument, which they need to buttress the historical argument, then they are reconceptualizing traditional notions of reason and objectivity rather than rejecting them. Even though the work that feminist philosophers have done to show the ways in which traditional conceptions of reason and objectivity are associated with maleness falls short of justifying their rejection, their work has been valuable in two respects. First, it has established that gender is associated with the central norms of philosophy, a conclusion that warrants attention from anyone attempting to understand our philosophical tradition. Second, the historical studies raise questions about reason and objectivity that are valuable areas of inquiry for contemporary philosophers.

2. FEMINIST REVISIONS OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY “These women are not women on the fringes of philosophy, but philosophers on the fringes of history” Mary Ellen Waithe

Feminist canon revision is most distinctive, and most radical, in its retrieval of women philosophers for the historical record, and in its placement of women in the canon of great philosophers. It is a distinctive project because there is no comparable activity undertaken by other contemporary philosophical movements, for whom canon creation has been largely a


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process of selection from an already established list of male philosophers. It is a radical project because by uncovering a history of women philosophers, it has destroyed the alienating myth that philosophy was, and by implication is or ought to be, a male preserve. In A History of Women Philosophers Mary Ellen Waithe has documented at least 16 women philosophers in the classical world, 17 women philosophers from 500-1600, and over 30 from 1600-1900. And, in the recent feminist series Re-reading the Canon three of the fourteen canonical philosophers are women: Mary Wollstonecraft, Hannah Arendt and Simone de Beauvoir. What is crucial to understand is that none of the three is canonical—if by that you mean included in the history of philosophy as it is told in philosophy department curricula, in histories of philosophy, and in scholarly writing. Indeed, The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, published in 1967, which contains articles on over 900 philosophers, does not include an entry for any of them. Moreover, if the index is to be believed, de Beauvoir and Wollstonecraft are not mentioned at all in any article, and Hannah Arendt merits a single mention in an article on “Authority”. Far from being canonical, these women philosophers are scarcely even marginal, warranting perhaps a passing reference in a survey of existentialism or political philosophy, but little more.22 Hence, the feminist series Re-reading the Canon is not only engaged in a critical re-reading of canonical figures like Plato and Hegel, but is also, by fiat, changing the contours of the canon. The project of retrieving women philosophers has a paradoxical relationship with contemporary feminist theory, however. On the one hand, it is clearly a feminist project; its originators were interested in establishing that women have been philosophers throughout the history of the discipline despite their routine omission from standard histories and encyclopedias of philosophy. However, the newly recovered women philosophers suggest that there is little overlap among three groups: women philosophers, feminine philosophers and feminist philosophers. For most of the newly discovered women philosophers were not feminist thinkers nor did they write philosophy in a feminine voice, different from their male counterparts. Indeed, their breadth of philosophical interests is comparable to that of male philosophers although their domain of application sometimes differs. In her introduction to A History of Women Philosophers Mary Ellen Waithe comments “If we except the Pythagorean women, we find little differences in the ways men and women did philosophy. Both have been concerned with ethics, metaphysics, cosmology, epistemology and other areas of philosophic inquiry.” 23 And another editor, Mary

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Warnock, comments “In the end, I have not found any clear “voice” shared by women philosophers. 24 The women philosophers restored to the tradition by feminist hands are not all proto-feminists nor do they speak in a uniform, and different, voice from their male peers. Similarly, women philosophers who are candidates for initiation into the philosophical canon—like Mary Wollstonecraft, Hannah Arendt and Simone de Beauvoir—are a diverse crew. According to Elizabeth YoungBruehl “That Hannah Arendt should have become a provocative subject for feminists is startling” presumably because of Arendt’s explicit criticism of feminism. And while Wollstonecraft and de Beauvoir were both feminists, they share neither a common philosophical voice nor common philosophical principles. In The Vindication of the Right’s of Women Wollstonecraft argued for the education of women using Enlightenment principles, while Beauvoir’s The Second Sex reflects her marxist and existentialist roots. The diversity of women philosophers raises the question why their recovery or re-valuation is an important project for contemporary feminist theory. What the retrieval of women philosophers, and their inclusion in the philosophical canon has done is to challenge the myth that there are no women in the history of philosophy and the fallback position that if there are any women philosophers, they are unimportant. Lovers of wisdom that we all are, we all benefit from the correction of these mistaken beliefs. Moreover, as feminists, we are interested in correcting the effects of discrimination against women philosophers, who were written out of history, unfairly, because of their gender not their philosophical ideas. However, what is really at issue is not philosophy’s past, but its present; its self-image as male. That self-image is created and maintained in part by a tacit historical justification. It is a damaging self-image for women philosophers today, and for women who aspire to be philosophers. The real significance of uncovering the presence of women in our history, and in placing women in our canon is the effect that has on the way we think about the “us” of philosophy.

3. FEMINIST APPROPRIATION OF CANONICAL PHILOSOPHERS Feminist philosophers have also changed the history of philosophy by appropriating its ideas for feminist purposes. From the perspective of negative canon formation, the history of philosophy is a resource only in so far as it describes the theories and thinkers that were most deeply mistaken


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about women. Other feminist historians of philosophy have found important resources for feminism in canonical philosophers. Indeed, they have found valuable concepts even in the worst offenders of the negative canon, like Aristotle and Descartes. For example, in the Fragility of Goodness Martha Nussbaum has described the virtues of an Aristotelian ethics with its emphasis on the importance of concrete context, emotion and care for others in an ethical life. 25 And Marcia Homiak has argued that Aristotle’s rational ideal, far from being antithetical to feminists, actually captures some of feminism’s deepest ethical insights.26 With regard to Descartes, Margaret Atherton has argued that his concept of reason was interpreted in egalitarian rather than masculinist terms by several women philosophers of the 18th century, and was used in their arguments for equal education for women.27 Other feminists have urged the reconsideration of the views of canonical figures, like Hume and Dewey, who have played only a minor role in the negative feminist canon. For example, Annette Baier has argued at length for the value of a Humean perspective in both epistemology and in ethics for feminist theory.28 And, in Pragmatism and Feminism Charlene Seigfried argues for the value of pragmatism for feminism; a position also taken by Richard Rorty.29 It is interesting to note that some of the very same philosophers who were cast as the villains of the negative canon are also mined by feminist theorists for useful ideas. Indeed, it is likely that every philosopher, from Plato to Nietzsche, who has been condemned to the negative canon also appears in some feminist’s positive canon. This is perplexing. After all, if feminists evaluate canonical texts so differently, it raises questions about the coherence of feminist interpretations of texts. Is Aristotle a feminist hero or villain? Are Descartes’ ideas dangerous for feminists or useful to them? If feminists have argued both positions, we begin to suspect that there is no such thing as a feminist interpretation of a philosopher. And this might lead us to wonder about the coherence and unity of the project of feminist canon revision. Why is it that feminist philosophers have reached different, and even sometimes incompatible interpretations of the history of philosophy? In my view, the multiple and contrary readings of the philosophical canon by feminists reflects the contested nature of the “us” of contemporary feminism. The fact that feminist interpretations of canonical figures is diverse reflects, and is a part of, on-going debates within feminism over its identity and self-image. Disagreements among feminist historians of philosophy over the value of canonical philosophers, and the appropriate categories to use to interpret them, are, in the final analysis, the result of

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debate within feminist philosophy over what feminism is, and what is theoretical committments should be, and what its core values are.

NOTES 1 Phyllis Rooney summarizes feminist criticisms of the “maleness” of reason in “Recent Work in Feminist Discussions of Reason” in the American Philosophical Quarterly Vol. 31, Number 1, January 1994. 2 The Philosophy of Right, T.M. Knox (trans) (New York, Oxford University Press, 1973) 263. 3 “Nourishing Speculation: A Feminist Reading of Aristotelian Science” in Engendering Origins: Critical Feminist Readings in Plato and Aristotle ed. By Bat-Ami Bar On (State University of New York Press, Albany 1994) 145-146. 4 Kant’s derogatory remarks about women are in his pre-critical work Observations on the Beautiful and Sublime p. 111 (Goldthwaite ed.). Robin Schott’s Eros and Cognition (Boston 1988) presents a critical, feminist reading of Kant’s conceptual framework. 5 I present and evaluate the evidence for this claim in “Form and Normativity in Aristotle” in Feminist Interpretations of Aristotle ed. Cynthia Freeland (forthcoming). 6 Feminists use the idea of a gendered notion to mean different things. In this article I draw a distinction between holding that a notion is intrinsically gendered, and holding that it is extrinsically gendered. Other feminists, however, use the idea of a gendered notion in ways that do not map easily onto my distinction. For example, as I discuss below, Genevieve Lloyd argues for the symbolic gendering of philosophical notions, and it may be that her interpretation does not map onto the intrinsic/extrinsic distinction. And Sally Haslanger argues that objectivity is a gendered notion in the philosophy of Catharine MacKinnon in a way that is neither extrinsic nor intrinsic. 7 In Discovering Reality ed. By Sandra Harding and Merrill B. Hintikka (D. Reidel 1983) p.2. 8 In “Aristotle and the Politicization of the Soul” in Discovering Reality. 9 Women in Western Political Thought by Susan Okin (Princeton 1979), chapter 4. 10 “Form, Normativity and Gender in Aristotle: A Feminist Perspective” in Feminist Interpretations of Aristotle ed. Cynthia Freeland (The Pennsylvania State University 1998). 11 For example, see Naomi Scheman’s “Though This Be Method, Yet There Is Madness in It: Paranoia and Liberal Epistemology” in Antony and Witt eds. A Mind of One’s Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity (Westview 1992); Susan Bordo’s The Flight to Objectivity (New York 1987); and Genvieve Lloyd’s The Man of Reason (Minnesota 1993) ch. 3. 12 Nancy Tuana’s Woman and the History of Philosophy (Paragon 1992) also provides a feminist reading of the history of philosophy. 13 Evelyn Fox Keller’s Reflections on Gender and Science is a classic source for feminist criticism of the rise of modern science. 14 The Man of Reason 2nd ed. (University of Minnesota Press 1993), ix. In another essay Lloyd explains that in her view there is an important connection between gender metaphors in philosophical texts and real world gender divisions and the way that gender identity is formed in a culture. See “Maleness, Metaphor, and the ‘Crisis’ of Reason” in A Mind of One’s Own ed. Louise Antony and Charlotte Witt (Westview 1992).


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See “Gendered Reason: Sex, Metaphor and Conceptions of Reason” by Phyllis Rooney in Hypatia 6:2 (Summer 1991): 77-103. 16 The Flight to Objectivity p. 100. 17 The Flight to Objectivity p. 5. 18 In “Though This Be Method, Yet There Is Madness in It” (in A Mind of One’s Own Naomi Scheman develops parallels between the Cartesian subject--disembodied, rational, and unitary--and the repression and projection characteristic of paranoia. Her analysis, like Bordo’s, makes use of psychoanalytic categories but it does not make a historical, cultural claim as Bordo does. 19 For a discussion of Irigaray’s contribution to feminist scholarship on the history of philosophy see. Yielding Gender: Feminism, Deconstruction and the History of Philosophy (London and New York:Routledge 1997) by Penelope Deutscher. 20 Bordo and Lloyd differ in other important respects as well. Bordo is interested in providing a social and psychological explanation for the masculinization of philosophy by Descartes. Why did Descartes conceive of reason and objectivity in a masculine guise? The social answer is that during his life European culture was undergoing a gynophobic spasm. The psychological answer depends upon object relations theory, and the development of that theory along gender lines by Chodorow and others. Lloyd is not interested primarily in the causal question addressed by Bordo. Moreover, she thinks that the maleness of reason in the philosophical tradition is primarily symbolic or metaphorical rather than social or psychological. Ultimately, then Bordo and Lloyd differ as to what is meant by the maleness of reason. 21 “Feminist Metaphysics” in A Mind of One’s Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity. (Westview 1993). 22 For a discussion of the omission of Simone de Beauvoir from the philosophical canon see the Introduction to Feminist Interpretations of Simone de Beauvoir ed. By Margaret A. Simons (Penn State 1995). 23 A History of Women Philosophers Vol. 1, xxi. 24 Women Philosophers (J.M. Dent 1996 ) xlvii. 25 The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge 1986). 26 See her paper “Feminism and Aristotle’s Rational Ideal” in A Mind of One’s Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity (Westview 1992). 27 See “Cartesian Reason and Gendered Reason” in A Mind of One’s Own. Celia Amoros has retrieved the arguments in support of the equality of the sexes made by the 17th century Cartesian philosopher Francois Poullain de la Barre (1647-1723). See her paper in Hypatia vol. 9, no. 1 (Winter 1994). 28 See Baier’s papers: “Hume, the Women’s Moral Theorist” Women and Moral Theory ed. Eva Feder Kittay and Diana T. Meyers (Roman and Littlefield, 1987) and “Hume, the Reflective Women’s Epistemologist?” in A Mind of One’s Own. 29 Pragmatism and Feminism (Chicago 1996). Rorty’s views can be found in “Feminism and Pragmatism” Michigan Quarterly Review 30/2 (Spring 1991) 231-58.

REFERENCES Amoross, Celia. “Cartesianism and Feminism”. In Hypatia Vol. 9, Issue 1, Winter, 1994. Antony, Louise and Witt, Charlotte eds. A Mind of One’s Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity. Boulder: Westview Press, 1992.

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Atherton, Margaret. “Cartesian Reason and Gendered Reason”. In A Mind of One’s Own. eds. Louise Antony and Charlotte Witt. Boulder: Westview Press, 1992. Baier, Annette. “Hume, the Women’s Moral Theorist”. Women and Moral Theory ed. Eva Feder Kittay and Diana T. Meyers. Maryland: Roman and Littlefield Publishers, 1987. Baier, Annette. “Hume, the Reflective Women’s Epistemologist?”. In A Mind of One’s Own ed. Louise Antony and Charlotte Witt. Boulder: Westview Press, 1992. Bordo, Susan. The Flight to Objectivity: Essays on Cartesianism and Culture. New York: State University of New York Press, 1987. Deutscher, Penelope. Yielding Gender: Feminism, Deconstruction and the History of Philosophy. London and New York: Routledge, 1997. Freeland, Cynthia. “Nourishing Speculation: A Feminist Reading of Aristotelian Science” in Engendering Origins: Critical Feminist Readings in Plato and Aristotle ed. By Bat-Ami Bar On. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994. Freeland, Cynthia. ed. Feminist Interpretations of Aristotle. University Park: Penn State University Press, 1998. Harding, Sandra and Hintikka, Merrill B. eds. Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology and Philosophy of Science. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003. Hegel, G.W.F. The Philosophy of Right, T.M. Knox (trans). New York: Oxford University Press, 1973. Homiak, Marcia. “Feminism and Aristotle’s Rational Ideal” . In A Mind of One’s Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity ed. Louise Antony and Charlotte Witt. Boulder: Westview Press, 1992. Kant, Immanuel. Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime. Ed. John T. Goldthwait. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Keller, Evelyn Fox. Reflections on Gender and Science . New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996. Lloyd, Genevieve. The Man of Reason: “Male” and “Female” in Western Philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985. Lloyd, Genevieve. “Maleness, Metaphor, and the ‘Crisis’ of Reason” in A Mind of One’s Own ed. Louise Antony and Charlotte Witt. Boulder: Westview Press, 1992. Nussbaum, Martha. The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Okin, Susan Moller. Women in Western Political Thought. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979. Rooney, Phyllis. “Gendered Reason: Sex, Metaphor and Conceptions of Reason” Hypatia 6:2 (Summer 1991): 77-103. Rooney, Phyllis. “Recent Work in Feminist Discussions of Reason” American Philosophical Quarterly Vol. 31, Number 1, January 1994. Rorty, Richard. “Feminism and Pragmatism”. In Michigan Quarterly Review 30/2 (Spring 1991) 231-58. Scheman, Naomi “Though This Be Method, Yet There Is Madness in It: Paranoia and Liberal Epistemology” A Mind of One’s Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity eds. Louise Antony and Charlotte Witt. Boulder: Westview Press, 1992. Schott, Robin. Cognition and Eros: A Critique of the Kantian Paradigm. University Park: Penn State University Press, 1993. Siegfried, Charlene. Pragmatism and Feminism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Simons, Margaret A. ed. Feminist Interpretations of Simone de Beauvoir. University Park: Penn State University Press, 1995. Tuana, Nancy. Woman and the History of Philosophy. St. Paul: Paragon Press, 1992. Waithe, Mary Ellen. A History of Women Philosophers, Vol. 1-4. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994.


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Warnock, Mary. ed. Women Philosophers. New York: Everyman’s Library, 1996. Witt, Charlotte. “Form, Normativity and Gender in Aristotle: A Feminist Perspective” in Feminist Interpretations of Aristotle ed. Cynthia Freeland. University Park: Penn State University Press, 1998. Witt, Charlotte. “Feminist Metaphysics” in A Mind of One’s Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity. Boulder: Westview Press, 1993.

IDENTITY AND GENDER IN PLATO

Kristin Sampson (University of Bergen, Norway)

There are many feminist methods and many ways in which to read Plato from a feminist perspective. One possible approach is to look at what Plato explicitly says about women. Both in the Republic and in the Timaeus Plato writes about women, and e.g. Julia Annas has presented a profound and interesting reading of the place of women in Plato’ state.1 In this paper I take a different approach. Instead of investigating Plato’s views of women, I look at the way specific theories and images of generation, birth and sexuality are related to the most fundamental levels of the philosophy of Plato. Much too often discussions concerned with “Plato’s views on women” get allotted the status of appendixes, resulting in a situation where we have “Plato’s philosophy” on the one hand, and “Plato’s views on women” on the other. And, in the eyes of many philosophers Plato’s views on women need have little or nothing to do with what is considered to be his so called “real” thinking: that is, his philosophy. I disagree with such views. What I want to do, is relate the two. Or rather, I want to look at the ways the two are related. In my attempt to do this, I examine some of the feminine figures which permeate his thinking and his texts, especially where these are used to speak of and illuminate the relation between the eternal ideas and the transient beings of sense perception. On the one hand I want to look at Plato’s most fundamental discussions about the One and the Other. On the other hand I want to relate these discussions to places in his texts where conceptions of gender appear, more or less indirectly: through metaphors, analogies and myths. By letting these two levels—the fundamental conceptual level and the metaphorical image level—reflect upon each other, I hope to be able to demonstrate connections between identity and gender in the texts of Plato.

17 L. Alanen and C. Witt (eds.), Feminist Reflections on the History of Philosophy, 17-32. © 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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Naturally I do not presume to examine all of Plato’s texts. In wanting to relate the gender perspective to the most fundamental levels in the philosophy of Plato it is natural to focus on the later dialogues. Among those, the Parmenides is distinguished by its discussions of the One (to hen) and the Other (talla), where Plato reflects upon the foundation of his theory of ideas. Among the later dialogues, the Timaeus moreover distinguishes itself, by its explicit demonstrations of the relation of his philosophy to a specific notion of conception and gender. According to Plato human life is perishable and changeable, while the ideas belong to the dimension of eternity and invariability. Plato solves the problems concerning the relation between these two dimensions by using several metaphors. One of the most recognized is the metaphor of copying; the objects in our transient world are imperfect copies of the perfect and immutable ideas. The objects in the physical world can be said to have identity only to the extent that they resemble and are related to the ideas, by being their copies. “Identity” should here be understood as a quite wide concept, not one limited to personal identity. Everything that can be said to exist—to be—must have some sort of identity, and what is most existing has the largest amount of identity. Identity is related to the ability to remain the same, i.e. unchanging. Invariability is one of the most important aspects of the ideas, and the most unchanging of all things conceivable should be the fundamental principle grounding the ideas: the One, which consequently also should have the largest amount of existence and identity.

1. COSMOGONY 1.1 The chôra in the Timaeus In Timaeus Plato describes the relation between the two dimensions of eternal ideas and changeable things by using the metaphor of birth, likening the ideas to a father engendering the things as his offspring. As he writes in the Timaeus (50d): “it is proper to liken the Recipient to the Mother, the Source to the Father and what is engendered between these two to the offspring.”2

This refers to a Greek concept of birth which is equivalent to what we would call conception. The mother’s delivery is merely viewed as a repetition of the father’s original act of giving birth nine months earlier, a view which implies seeing the mother as a recipient: a container functioning as some sort of incubator. Such a view is not specific to Plato. This was a common view of reproduction in ancient Greece. Numerous examples of comparisons made between human reproduction on the one


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hand, and vegetative reproduction on the other—with the mother described as a field in which the father sows his seed—can be found in the literature previous to Plato, for instance in the tragedies.3 In Aeschylus’ Eumenides, for instance, Apollo claims that: “The mother of what is called her child— is no parent (tokeus) of it, but nurse only of the young life that is sown in her. The parent is the male, and she but a stranger, a friend, who, if fate spares his plant, preserves it till it puts forth.”4 Another example can be found in Sophocles’ Antigone where Creon, wanting his son Haemon to abandon Antigone and find someone else to marry, says that “the furrows of others can be ploughed!”5 A woman’s womb was considered by the ancient Greeks to be something in which the father gave birth, and as such a passive albeit necessary condition. The conception was thought of as the original birth, as something which the mother’s delivery simply mirrored nine months later. And this is exactly how Plato, when likening the relation between ideas and things to a birth, views the maternal principle. That in which the father engenders the material objects—the recipient—is likened to a mother. Not only in the poetic and dramatic literature, but also in the Greek philosophical texts previous to Plato, such a vegetative view of generation and birth may be found.6 What is interesting in Plato is that this view of reproduction has consequences for his thinking about ideas and sensible things. Or rather: what I am interested in here, is examining the way Plato’s philosophical thinking is related to specific ways of thinking about sexual difference. In his metaphor of birth in the Timaeus, Plato shows clearly that the metaphor of copying implies a certain view of propagation, with ONE original (idea) reproducing itself in something OTHER than itself (chôra). This implies—and explains—why the copy is imperfect. In the Timaeus Plato explicitly states that the ideas are masculine principles, whereas the receptacle—chôra—is likened to a mother, who is necessary as that in which the masculine constitutes itself. The copies are defective because of this necessary space, which in the Timaeus is portrayed as a feminine figure. I will argue that the metaphor of copying opens up certain ways of thinking about birth and procreation and excludes others, and that this metaphor excludes a notion of two different fundamental principles (archês). I further wish to argue that Plato’s philosophy necessitates a conception of the feminine—i.e. the mother—as an ideally empty space, devoid of any properties of its own. By connecting space and the mother through the image he presents in Timaeus Plato weaves the concept of space into a pattern of sexual difference. Or perhaps it is the other way around: Maybe it is sexual difference that is molded after the model of a certain concept of space. Given both of these interpretations, a question may be posed: What kind of concept of sexual difference does this platonic picture render possible? The mother—chôra—is said to be of a kind (eidos) “invisible (anoraton) and

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formless (amorphon), all-embracing (pandeches), possessed in a most puzzling way of intelligibility, yet very hard to grasp.”7 (Timaeus 51a). On the one hand she is obviously necessary as that in which the perceptible things are constituted. On the other hand the physical things are imperfect copies of their perfect father, and what but chôra can explain the engendered things’ lack of complete identity and resemblance to their paternal principle? To the degree that chôra is a something having a form or identity of her own, she must represent a possible threat of imposing imperfection on the things by hindering their similarity to the idea they are born from. The ideal mother must be devoid of all characters “invisible and formless”. Her position thus seems to involve a paradox in that she is both a necessary condition for the material things and a threat to their perfection and identity. No wonder she is “very hard to grasp”. 1.2 The myth of the cave in the Republic There are other feminine figures in Plato’s texts functioning in a way similar to chôra in Timaeus. That is to say, Plato’s use of an image of sexual difference in Timaeus is not accidental. It is not an isolated instance. Images of birth, sexuality and femininity permeate many of Plato’s texts. One example is the famous myth of the cave in the Republic. In Speculum of the Other Woman Luce Irigaray gives a new reading of this myth. She presents an interpretation where she draws attention to what has been taken for granted to such a degree that it has been completely un-problematized and disregarded in the more traditional interpretations of the myth: the cave itself. Irigaray likens the cave with a womb. I shall not here go deeply into Irigaray’s profound and much disputed reading of the myth of the cave, but merely point out that the cave/womb may be seen as a feminine figure in Plato’s text functioning somewhat in the same way as chôra in the Timaeus. On the one hand the cave seems to represent a necessary condition for human life. The cave is where life among humans is lived. We, ordinary human beings, are like the prisoners chained in the dark cave only lit up by a feeble and flickering fire casting illusory shadows, without recourse to the real light of the real sun in the daylight above. According to Socrates’ speech in the seventh book of the Republic (517b) we must liken “the region revealed through sight to the habitation of the prison”. On an epistemological level the cave is the site of mere opinion (doxa) while the sunlit world outside is the realm of intelligibility and truth (alêtheia). The cave is crucial to this platonic imagery of shadowy reflections and real objects, both by its closing out the light of truth, and by its being that onto which the shadows are reflected. The back of the cave is that which receives the impressions of the shadows and as such it represents a necessary condition for the images. It is the condition for the play of doxa,


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a condition for knowledge among the mortal human beings, and at the same time it is the reason for the insufficiency and uncertainty of this knowledge. So the cave is something to be transcended. Only by turning around and climbing out of the cave, can the prisoner achieve true insight into the real world illuminated by the one and only sun. The cave/womb is thus presented both as a necessary condition and as something it is necessary to transcend to achieve full insight into the real world of the ideas.

1.3 The feminine figure of the earth in Phaedo Another example of a feminine figure functioning in a similar way as chôra of the Timaeus and the cave of the Republic is the earth Gê in the great myth of reincarnation in the Phaedo8. According to this myth, we human beings do not as we usually think, live upon the surface of earth. We inhabit—live in—the earth. As Plato writes (Phaedo 109c): “we do not perceive that we live in the hollows (en tois koilos), but think we live on the upper surface of the earth, just as if someone who lives in the depth of the ocean should think he lived on the surface of the sea.”

The parallel here to the myth of the cave is evident. Just as Socrates in the Republic claims that the human condition is posited in a cave and not, as we might tend to believe, in the light of truth outside, so he here proclaims us unknowingly to inhabit the hollows (tois koilos) and not the surface of the earth. The Greek word koila can be used both of the hollows of the earth and the hollows in a body, for instance the womb. So in this myth, as well as that of the cave, the hollow cavities may be seen as a womb, in this case as the womb of the earth Gê, which by the Greeks was thought of as a mother and a goddess.9 Gê function as a feminine figure with liquid fluids flowing in her pulsating body (Phaedo 112-113), and she does—as a mother with a womb—give birth. According to the myth of reincarnation she is that out of which the souls are born into a new life. When the souls inhabiting this mother earth, or rather when the human beings the souls are part of, die, their souls descend deeper into the earth. Here each soul is sentenced according to the way they have lived their lives. Most of the souls have to spend a certain time within the realm of death, within mother earth—Gê—before once more they are born into and mixed with a body, to live a new life. After their allotted time the souls, at least most of them, are again born out of the cavities of the earth as out of a mother. By presenting the earth both as that from which the souls are born into a new life, and as that into which the souls descend at the death of the living being of which they were a part, this feminine figure represents an image through which birth and death are united. The birth-giving Gê constitutes the realm of both human life and death.

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Being a mixture of body and soul, dissolution and death is imminent and unavoidable for the human beings.10 Some souls, however, do escape from the wheel of reincarnation turning between human life and death in Gê: These are the worst and the best of the souls. Plato characteristically places human life in a space between extremes. This is a very Greek way of thinking, although turned somewhat upside down by Plato. According to Aristotle, as well as many other Greek thinkers (e.g. Heraclitus), the good life lies in the harmony and balanced center between two extremes. Plato, on the other hand, places the ultimate goal for the souls outside the human condition, in what may be called an extreme position. The good is not situated in the in-between, but pushed outside into a dimension which can hardly be said to be between anything: Rather it constitutes the ultimate “above everything”. Following a tradition of Greek thinking like in Heraclitus, we could argue for the beneficence of the human condition and against the perversity of the position of the extreme which Plato idealizes. Striving to transcend the human condition might then be seen as a wanton wish to rise into the dimension of the divine, displaying a lack of moderation that might be named hybris. The worst of the souls are thrown into Tartaros, from which there is no escape. Tartaros is described by Plato as chasmatôn megiston: as the greatest of chasms (Phaedo 111e-112a). Hesiod uses the expression chasma mega, the great chasm, to describe the chaotic place that is Tartaros, and Vigdis Songe-Møller has argued that chaos in Hesiod can be seen as a feminine principle and not as a neutral principle as many would hold.11 Tartaros is the bottomless cleft at the core of the earth, a terrible place from where no one escapes. It is a place of dissolution, where nothing and no one can retain their identity and stability. This chaotic chasm which is Tartaros, cutting through the earth, cutting it in two, may be seen as an expression of the splitting which the image of birth and the mother carries within. By giving birth she also carries death with her and within her. Chasmatôn megiston—the greatest of chasms—cleaves open a space of dark and disruptive otherness: chaos. This chaotic space opens an ultimate hollow cavity in the earth, an incarnate cave: incomprehensible horror. Not only the worst, but also the best of the souls, escape a rebirth into a new life according to the myth of reincarnation in the Phaedo. The wisest of souls, those that during their human life have practiced true philosophy, i.e. practiced separating their souls from their body, “practiced dying,” as Plato explicitly writes, these best of souls escape the earth altogether. They are neither reborn nor thrown into the chaotic chasm of Tartaros but rises up out of the hollows of the earth—out of the caves/cavities/spaces of the earth—and reach into the masculine heaven: Ouranos.


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1.4 Analogies between the three figures of spatiality By making a detour through this myth in the Phaedo and the myth of the cave in the Republic, I believe it is possible to shed some light on the figure of chôra in the Timaeus. Why does Plato compare space explicitly to a mother, and why does he give her such a peculiar—if not to say impossible—position? Regarding the geography of the earth described in the Phaedo, and of the cave in the Republic, I think we may come to see more clearly what kind of space Plato presents in the Timaeus, and why it is described in the way it is. Gê—the mother earth in the Phaedo—shows the intermingling of life and death. What is born into a human life must also die. Only by escaping the geography of the earth can the philosopher-souls obtain immortality beyond both life and death. The cave in the Republic represents a threat to the souls’ attainment of truth. Chôra in the Timaeus imposes deficiency on the material objects in our transient world, representing a threat to their autonomy, identity and perfection; to their remaining unchangeably what they are. All three of them—the earth, the cave and chôra—imposes changeability, i.e. death, and death is inextricably knitted together with birth, feminine birth, that is. Seen from the perspective of eternity and perfect invariability, change represents a deficiency. Only by representing death, dissolution and change as something feminine, something alien and other, can the masculine soul of the philosopher hope to obtain immortality, i.e. viewing absolute truth in the heaven of the eternal ideas. Jean-Pierre Vernant writes that “femininity acts like death” among the Greeks.12 On the stage set up in Plato’s texts however, femininity does not simply act like death. Since it also constitutes a necessary condition for human life, the feminine figures are given a role which is fundamentally ambiguous. Gê brings death, but she also brings life. What seems to be correct however, is that death always plays a feminine role. Death, dissolution and changeability seem inextricably connected with femininity. So, in Plato femininity does not merely act like death, but death does act in the guise of feminine figures. As I see it, the earth in the Phaedo, the cave in the Republic, and chôra in the Timaeus are feminine figures functioning in a similar fashion. All three are presented in an ambiguous way, simultaneously necessary and a threat. These feminine figures therefore all represent a problematic ontological position. The earth is, on the one hand, a necessary condition for human life, constituting the place we inhabit. On the other hand the earth is something which the soul of the true philosopher must transcend to escape the cycle of life and death and exist immortal in the masculine heaven of invariability. The cave is necessary to human life, but something which the philosopher must transcend to reach the truth. In the Timaeus chôra is necessary as that into which the transient objects are born, but something which threatens their perfect identity and resemblance to their

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father. The ideal chôra (and the ideal mother?) is said to be without characteristics—formless—and, at the same time, this lack of identifying forms is exactly what constitutes her identity. In this way she is given an ontological position that is problematic, if not impossible. For how can lack of identifying forms be said to constitute the identifying forms of anything? All of the three feminine figures are thus difficult in analogous ways, and in my view they all display a fundamental problem in the philosophy of Plato. The way I see it, these three feminine figures show that this fundamental problem in Plato is related to a specific way of thinking of sexual difference.

2. CHRONOGONY So far I have spoken about three different figures related to space. The cave, the earth and chôra are all places to be inhabited, by man or by the ideas. Place, or rather space, is one of the fundamental concepts in western philosophy. Another fundamental concept is the concept of time. Plato discusses time in the Timaeus, and in his discussions of time he also uses an image of generation and birth. He speaks of time as a living, generated being, just as he does when he speaks of cosmos, and uses expressions as “the birth of time” (chronou geneseôs) (Timaeus 39e). This time which is born is what I want to indicate by naming this section of my paper by the invented word chronogony. Just as cosmogony literally means the birth of cosmos, so chronogony means the birth of time.

2.1 Time and eternity Plato writes in the Timaeus that time—chronos—is a moving image of eternity (Timaeus 37d). Time (chronou) “images (mimoumenou) eternity (aiôna) and revolves according to number (arithmon)”.13 The context of this statement is the description of the birth of cosmos, with the ideas as fathers and chôra—the recipient—figuring as the mother. As Plato writes: “When the father who had begotten it [the cosmos] saw it set in motion and alive (...) he rejoiced and being well pleased he took thought to make it yet more like its pattern (paradeigma).”14 This paradigm is an eternally living being (zoon aidion on). But, “this character [i.e. its eternity] it was impossible to confer in full completeness on the generated thing”, i.e. on cosmos.15 The world cannot be made eternal. Instead the world is made an eternal image (aiônion eikona) “moving according to numbers”. Something strange is said here. On the one hand the cosmos is not eternal, but on the other hand it is made to be an eternal—everlasting—image of the eternally living being.


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A key to understanding—although not solving—this puzzle lies in the etymology of the Greek word for eternity: aiôn. Aiôn has several meanings, and two of them seems to be diametrically opposed to each other. On the one hand the word is used of something that lasts forever, like when Plato claims that cosmos is everlasting. On the other hand aiôn can be used of something that lasts for a lifetime, like a living being. How can two not simply dissimilar, but seemingly opposite meanings—the unlimited eternity and the limited lifetime—be expressed in the same word? The transition from ‘eternity’ to ‘lifetime’ seems great and surprising indeed. These two concepts are usually considered to be mutually exclusive. For, it is not a meaning a la ‘eternal lifetime’ aiôn expresses in antiquity, it is a transient lifetime, and if a lifetime can be said to measure anything, it is a limited existence it is measuring. This reasoning is borrowed from the linguist Emile Benveniste, who gives an explanation of how this transference of meaning can have happened.16 He points to the plurality of meanings related to aiôn in indo-European languages, including the ancient Greek language from Homer forwards. Between the different meanings related to aiôn Benveniste tries to reconstruct a continuity or development both chronologically, etymologically and conceptually. In Homer aiôn still retains its full meaning related to the human life. Here the word not only indicates the lifetime of a human being, it expresses the force of life or source of life and vitality.17 Aiôn is the principle that keeps a human being alive—the life-principle—and this is the explanation of why it is considered to be the measure of the lifetime of the living being. As long as the aiôn remains intact, the human being remains alive. When aiôn becomes the name of eternity, this has to do with the reproduction of a structure in this human aiôn on a cosmological level, according to Benveniste. Aiôn exists on both a micro- and a macro-cosmic level. Between these two—what he calls a human aiôn and a cosmic aiôn— there is an accordance: The force of life is to be understood as reproduction, where something new is constantly replacing the old. This life-force, implying constant reproduction, leads the mind to imaging something upholding itself neverendingly, all the time appearing as fresh and new. In the universe there is constant reproduction, and the universe itself might therefore be conceived of as an entity having these qualities of constant and continuous reproduction. Everything in the universe has a beginning and an end—i.e. is born and must die. This is a law of nature. But this law itself need have no beginning or end. As Benveniste writes: Everything recommences except the law of recommencement. As regards time, every element of the universe is at the same time limited and unlimited: Limited in so far as it belongs to a limited duration, unlimited 18 because it reinstates without stop its limited duration. What interests me here is the fact that these ambiguities exist. I now wish to see what

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structures can be found in Plato’s description of the generation of time, and how possible ambiguities or paradoxes here can be understood. 2.2 Ambiguities in Plato’s conception of time As I have stated, time, according to Plato, is related to eternity by being its imitation. But why is time an imperfect image of eternity? Why is not time eternal? Or rather: Why are not time and eternity identical? An answer to these questions may be found by looking at what time does. According to Plato, time has to do with numbers and ordering. Time for Plato is measurable time. And, as Vlastos has pointed out, a precondition of measurableness is uniform motion.19 As long as there is only disorderly motion, i.e. chaos, there is no time. Time is the ordering of chaotic movement, and plays a vital part in the creation of cosmos out of chaos. Or to approach the conclusion through a slightly different path: Time imposes order. A necessary condition for any ordering is that there is something ‘there’ to be ordered, something that needs ordering. The raw material time imposes its ordering upon is, as Gregory Vlastos has shown, genesis. Genesis is what must be presupposed, what must be ‘there’, before anything can supervene to ‘rule’ and order it. Genesis is usually translated as the principle of becoming or birth. The generated chronos represents an ordering of the raw genesis, which in its turn seems close to unorderly motion and chaos. This genesis—understood as a principle of becoming— must exist as a fundamental precondition of the creation of the universe and time. But it is difficult to say what it is. As a precondition of the ordering of time it is unordered, which implies that it is without measurements and limits that make it possible to distinguish and grasp. And, strange as it may seem, the more genesis is deprived of stable being, the more true it becomes that it really is genesis—i.e. becoming—and necessarily changing. But claiming that becoming is—esti genesis—sounds like a contradiction in terms.20 The paradox is a real one: On the one hand, genesis must exist as a necessary precondition of the ordering of time. On the other, this genesis cannot be said to exist, at least not in the way Plato defines existence, i.e. as unchangeable stable being. In the universe the ordered motion of time can first and foremost be seen in the movement of the planets and stars. The word Plato uses of the movements—literally “the wanderings”—of stars and planets is planas (Timaeus 39d): “(...) the ‘wandering’ of the planets is time.”21 Plato uses planê to describe the model of ordered motion, the movement of the planets, but the word carries other meanings, e.g. “a wandering” about, or a “digression”. Metaphorically it can be used of a “going astray” or “error.”22 All of these meanings seem far from the sense Plato indicates in relation to


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time, i.e. as ordered motion. Compared to the eternity which it imitates, time will always be imperfect and insufficient and, maybe, unreliable. 2.3 Comparisons between time and cosmos Time is generated in a meeting between, on the one hand, the unchangeable timeless eternity and, on the other hand, the unorderly, everchanging and chaotic genesis. Cosmos is a child born in the meeting between the ideas and chôra. In the structure of these images of procreation which Plato uses to describe both spatiality and temporality, cosmos and time are both placed in the role of generated children. The beings of the transient world are born as images of the eternal patterns—the ideas—and one of the most prominent features of these ideas is that they never have been born. They are ungenerated. Time is an image of eternity—a moving image—and one of the most important characteristics of eternity is that it is immobile. The fathers in the images are the ideas and eternity, the mothers are chôra and genesis, respectively. My claim is that Plato speaks of genesis in terms comparable to the way in which he speaks of chôra, and that they are the key factors in the paradoxes produced. They are the disturbing elements which Plato at first tries to forget, but later realizes are unavoidable. Both chôra and genesis represent necessary conditions for the existence of cosmos and time, respectively, but at the same time threaten the perfection and permanence of that which is born out of the eternally unborn. In speaking of cosmos Plato relates the story of how it was born and describes its parents—i.e. he tells the tale of cosmogony. In his descriptions of time he does a similar thing: It is the story of the birth of time we are told. I have been tempted to invent a new concept in claiming that it is a chronogony Plato gives here. To complete this invention of words playing on the generative and procreative aspects of Plato’s figures, I might say that I now wish to say a few words, not about Plato’s ontology, but about his ontogony.

3. ONTOGONY 3.1 The fundamental discussions in the Parmenides In the dialogue Parmenides Plato discusses what may be called the foundation of his so called theory of ideas. Here Plato reflects upon the principles of the One and the Other. The dialogue concludes with the famous passage where both the One and the Other are presented in somewhat contradictory terms (Parmenides 166c):

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“‘(...) whether the one is or is not, the one and the others in relation to themselves and to each other all in every way are and are not and appear and do not appear.’ ‘Very true.’”

Parmenides displays the fundamental problem related to thinking the relation between the One (to hen) and the Other (talla) as a dichotomy, where the One is the not-Other and vice versa. The One is an expression of absolute oneness, of the perfect unity. It is unchangeable; eternally remaining the same as itself. The One consequently belongs to, or maybe rather constitutes, the realm of sameness. By being the same, it remains the same as itself: It has perfect identity and being. Being is here to be understood in opposition to becoming, which indicates an instability towards which the One is immune. The One is perhaps foremost the notOther. This implies that the Other—which the One is not—is necessary and vital to the constituting and conceiving of the One as something: as an identity of which it is possible to speak through the language of logos. For the One to be, and be conceivable it needs something else—something Other than itself—over and against which it is founded. The Other, accordingly, is everything the One is not. It is plural, changeable and perishable, never remaining the same. In the Parmenides the dichotomy between oneness and otherness emerges as equivalent to the dichotomy between unity and plurality (Parmenides 158b). But in the furthermost consequence of the notion of plurality lies chaos: The ultimate dissolution and lack of identity and sameness. In this respect the Other in the Parmenides is similar to the earth of the Phaedo. At the core of both the concept of the Other and the feminine figure of the earth lies chaos. The Other is similar to chôra and genesis in the Timaeus as well: By being the not-One the Other is plural and represent an absolute lack of unity, and thereby also of identity. At the same time it is exactly this—its being the not-One—that constitute the Other as other. The paradox is obvious: It is the Other’s lack of identity that gives it its identity, just as it is the lack of form of chôra and genesis that constitute their forms. Analogous to chôra and genesis the Other appears as something both necessary and impossible. Chôra is necessary as that in which the material things are constituted, genesis is necessary as that of which time is an ordering, and the Other is necessary as that against which the One is constituted as an ontological and epistemological being. According to Plato the ideas, let alone the One, are not concepts accessible through language, but visible to the mental eye of a very few philosopher-souls in a glimpse of sudden intuition. Nevertheless, if we insist upon staying inside language in our investigation of both the ideas and of the relation between the One and the Other, some interesting problems will arise and some strange displacements occur. They most certainly appear and occur in the Parmenides. In the Parmenides the problems related to the ontological position of the Other are turned back to


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the ontological position of the One as well. Even the One emerges as both being and not being. This might be seen as Plato’s own questioning of his so called theory of ideas. Both the One and the Other show themselves to be at the same time both necessary and problematic. My claim is that the problems which arise when one tries to comprehend within language the relation which Plato sets up between the One and the Other, are related to a certain way of thinking about sexual difference. In my view, Plato in the Parmenides gives the Other an ontological position which is problematic in a way similar to that of the earth, the cave, chôra and genesis. This might be revealed by performing a movement from the cave through the earth to chôra and genesis with an arrival at the concept of the Other. On different levels they can all be said to display a similar pattern: In the Republic, Plato on an epistemological level, describes what may be called the path towards knowledge.23 To reach knowledge the philosopher must climb out of, and transcend, the feminine cave. In the Phaedo, on an ethical level, the path towards immortality is displayed. The best of souls—i.e. the souls of those who have lived the good lives of true philosophers—will obtain immortality by transcending the feminine mother earth and rise into the heaven of pure masculinity. In the Timaeus, on an ontological24 level, the path towards the ideas is indicated. Imperfection and transience is inflicted upon physical things by their being born into chôra, so perfection and immutability must necessarily lie beyond the feminine chôra, of which the path towards the ideas involves a transcending. This path also involves the transcendence into the timeless eternity, devoid of any becoming—any genesis—whatsoever. Finally, in the Parmenides, on what might be called a fundamental level, with its discussions of the principles constituting the foundation for the so called theory of ideas, we find what could be viewed as an attempt to unfold the path towards the One. Perfect unity resides in a dimension over and beyond the Other, and in my view this means that it must belong to a dimension which is placed beyond femininity. Being part of the same dilemma, and falling into a pattern akin to that of the feminine figures, I find it hard to believe that the Other should have nothing to do with femininity. All of these—both the feminine figures and the principle of the Other—are something to be transcended, but, alas, at the same time they are crucially necessary to that which strives to transcend them. Through this comparison of the analogous problematic ontological positions of, on the one hand, the feminine figures of the cave, the earth, chôra, and genesis and, on the other hand, the concept of the Other, I hope to have argued that the Other in Plato’s Parmenides is a feminine other: A feminine Other without characteristics of her own. In the Parmenides Plato presents a feminine Other that is nothing but the negation of a masculine One. This implies that sexual difference in the philosophy of Plato is thought not as a real difference, with masculinity and femininity posited as

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different and equal, both with properties of their own. The relation between masculine and feminine is thought as a dichotomy, within the logic of sameness, not as a real difference.

NOTES 1

Julia Annas, chapter 7 in An Introduction to Plato’s Republic. R.G. Bury’s translation in the Loeb Classical Library edition. All the following quotations from Plato’s texts are taken from the Loeb Classical Library if not otherwise indicated. 3 It would seem Sara B. Pomeroy is right in wondering “if Plato believed, as did Apollo in the Eumenides (657-61), that only the father is the true parent and the mother only nurses the seed.” S.B. Pomeroy “Feminism in Book V of Plato’s Republic,” Apeiron (1974), p.34. David Farrell Krell also points to Aeschylus’ Eumenides (657-59) in his paper “Female Parts in Timaeus” in Arion 1975, 414. 4 Aeschylus, Eumenides 659-665, in Verrall’s translation. Apollo continues with a proof of this theory of reproduction, which deprives the mother of true parenthood, i.e. the birth of Athena (665-670): “And I will show thee a proof of this argument. A father may become such without a mother’s aid. Here at my hand is a witness, the Child of Olympian Zeus,— who, even ere she came to light, grew not in a womb, yet is a fairer plant than all the powers of heaven could beget.” 5 Sophocles, Antigone 569, in Hugh Lloyd-Jones’ translation. 6 Francis Cornford argues in favor of such a view when he writes about the Timaeus 50d: “The argument that the receptacle must not possess in itself any quality like those which enter it, is preceded by the comparison of the eternal Form to the father and of the Receptacle to the mother. The connection of thought implies a current view of the part played by the mother in generation,” he writes, and points to the above mentioned tragedy by Aeschylus—the Eumenides—as well as to Diodorus and to Aristotle’s description of Anaxagoras and other of the pre-Socratic philosophers as representatives of the same opinions: “according to Diodorus (i. 80), the Egyptians regarded no child as a bastard, holding that the father is the sole cause of generation, while the mother furnishes only nourishment (trophê) and room (chord) for the infant. The belief is mentioned several times by Aristotle, who debates whether the female contributes anything to generation or only provides the place (topos). He gives it as the opinion of Anaxagoras and other physicists that the seed comes from the male, the female only furnishing the place.” Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, 187. 7 Desmond Lee’s translation in the Penguin Classics edition of Timaeus, GB 1987. 8 I have given a reading of this myth of reincarnation and the feminine figure of the earth Gê in the fourth chapter in Selvets logikk i Platons Faidon. En kritikk av Platons plassering av selvet i forhold til motsetningsparene kropp-sjel, dødelig-udødelig og kvinnelig-mannlig. 9 Ample evidence of this can be found for instance in Hesiod. 10 The thought of the intimate relation between the fact of being born out of a woman’s womb and the necessity of death is common among the Greeks, something which Vigdis Songe-Møller has shown in several articles, and also in her book Den greske drømmen om kvinnens overflødighet, e.g. chapter 2 “Tenkning og seksualitet: et problematisk forhold. En analyse av Hesiod og Parmenides,” 53-101. 11 V. Songe-Møller, ibid. 12 Jean-Pierre Vernant, Mortals and Immortals, Princeton 1992, 101. 13 Timaeus 38a, in Francis M. Cornford’s translation. 14 Timaeus 37c, Cornford’s translation. 15 Timaeus 37d, Cornford’s translation. 2


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16

Emile Benveniste, “Expression indo-européen de l’‘éternité’,” Bulletin de la Société de linguistique vol.38 (1937): 103-139. 17 Benveniste, ibid., 107: “Chez Homère, aiwn s’entend encore dans sa pleine signification humaine; non ‘temps de vie’, mais ‘force de vie, source de vitalité’.” 18 Benveniste, ibid., 112. 19 Gregory Vlastos, “The Disorderly Motion in the Timaeus”, (1939) in Studies in Plato’s metaphysics, Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd 1965, 379-421. The following paragraph is highly influenced by this inspiring article. 20 This argument belongs to Gregory Vlastos, “The Disorderly Motion in the Timaeus,” (1939) in Studies in Plato’s metaphysics, Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd 1965, see 388-89. 21 Gregory Vlastos, “The Disorderly Motion in the Timaeus (1939),” in R.E. Allen, Studies in Plato’s Metaphysics, Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd 1965, 388. In Greek the expression planetes asteres—which is the name of the planets—literally means “wandering stars”. 22 Liddell and Scott, In is related masculine form—planos—it can be used of a wanderer, vagabond or even one that misleads. 23 Paul Friedländer, Plato: An Introduction, Princeton 1973, p.64, describes what he calls three different paths—the paths of knowledge, love and death—respectively to be found in the Republic, the Symposium/Phaedrus and the Phaedo. 24 Timaeus is most commonly called “cosmological”. However, I believe that I have shown that this dialogue also contains ontological discussions, e.g. in speaking about the relation between the ideas, the space and the material things.

REFERENCES Aeschylus. The Eumenides. Translated by A. W. Verrall, London 1908. Annas, Julia. An Introduction to Plato’s Republic. Oxford 1981. Annas, Julia. “Plato’s Republic and Feminism,” Philosophy 5 (1976), p.307-321. Benveniste, Emile. “Expression indo-européen de l’’éternité,’” Bulletin de la Société de linguistique vol.38 (1937), p.103-139. Cornford, Francis. Plato’s Cosmology. Hackett Publishing Company 1997. Friedländer, Paul. Plato: An Introduction. Bollingen Series LIX / Princeton 1973. Friedländer, Paul. Plato. Vol.III, Princeton University Press 1969. Irigaray, Luce. Speculum of the Other Woman. Cornell University Press 1985. Krell, David Farrell. “Female Parts in Timaeus,” Arion (1975), p.400-422. Plato. Parmenides. Translated by H. N. Fowler, Loeb Classical Library, vol.IV: Cratylus. Parmenides. Greater Hippias. Lesser Hippias. Harvard University Press 1977. Plato. Phaedo. Translated by Harold North Fowler, Loeb Classical Library, vol.I: Euthyphro. Apology. Crito. Phaedo. Phaedrus. Harvard University Press 1990. Plato. Republic. Translated by Paul Shorey, Loeb Classical Library, vol.V, Harvard University Press 1982 and vol.VI, 1987. Plato. Timaeus. Translated by R. G. Bury, Loeb Classical Library, vol. IX: Timaeus. Critias. Cleitophon. Menexenus. Epistles. Harvard University Press 1989. Plato.Timaeus and Critias. Translated by Desmond Lee, Penguin Classics, Great Britain 1987. Pomeroy, Sara B. “Feminism in Book V of Plato’s Republic,” Apeiron 1974. Sampson, Kristin. Selvets logikk i Platons Faidon. En kritikk av Platons plassering av selvet i forhold til motsetningsparene kropp-sjel, dødelig-udødelig og kvinnelig-mannlig. University of Bergen 1994. Songe-Møller, Vigdis. Den greske drømmen om kvinnens overflødighet. Essays om myter og filosofi i antikkens Hellas. Cappelen Akademisk Forlag, Oslo 1999. Sophocles. Antigone. Translated by Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Loeb Classical Library, 1994. Vernant, Jean-Pierre. Mortals and Immortals. Princeton University Press 1992.

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Vlastos, Gregory. “The Disorderly Motion in the Timaeus,” (1939). In Studies in Plato’s metaphysics, Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd 1965, p.379-421.

SCHEMES AND SCENES OF READING THE TIMAEUS

Cynthia A. Freeland (University of Houston, U.S.A.)

Plato has an undisputed “seminal” role in western thought and is often both credited with much—witness Whitehead’s famous “history of philosophy as a footnote to Plato” comment—and blamed for much: the origins of logocentrism, phallocentrism, the turning away of philosophy from its true path of searching for Being.1 Plato was capable both of writing derisively about women and of radically envisaging their liberation through education and shared governance.2 Weighing heavily on the minus side of the sexism equation are passages in his cosmological dialogue The Timaeus in which he compares the featureless Receptacle to the womb of all creation, and writes of it with seeming disgust as the source of evil material necessity in the cosmos. Feminist, psychoanalytic, and deconstructive writers have made the crucial passage (52a8) about the characterless, eternal female space (khora) of cosmic generation perhaps the most frequently discussed (and notorious) of classical texts in recent years. We can find sometimes intriguing, often laborious, and inevitably dense discussions of it in Derrida, Spivak, Kristeva, Irigaray, and Butler, to name a few.3 For the deconstructors, the passages about the khora are critical “logocentric” moves—a founding-point for western philosophy’s errors as a whole. Butler even describes this passage as a “topos of the metaphysical tradition” (p. 39). When feminists and deconstructors raise questions about the paradoxical nature of Plato’s description of the Receptacle as impossible object/subject, they turn out to be surprisingly like many analytic philosophers who have written on this text. Almost all of the readers alike strike me as obtuse to the pitfalls and challenges of interpreting such a 33 L. Alanen and C. Witt (eds.), Feminist Reflections on the History of Philosophy, 33-49. © 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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skilled and complex writer as Plato. In the Timaeus, Plato uses a cornucopia of metaphors to depict the Receptacle: mirror, nurse or mother, gold, base for scented ointments, wax or other soft substance, and winnowing-basket. Existing interpretations, whether “continental” or “analytic,” “feminist” or otherwise, proceed by selectively reading only some from this list, and moreover, by extracting the Receptacle from a literary work that is a very subtle, wily, and perplexing whole. In this article I want to consider the myriad of recent feminist readings of the Receptacle as illustrations of the larger difficulty of interpreting the moral message of the Timaeus. Feminist agendas complicate the already knotty problem of interpreting this difficult dialogue—one in which Plato, through the spokesman/character of Timaeus, consistently calls his own cosmology a mere “likely story” (eikos muthos). Given this status, Plato may have meant to qualify whatever moral message we are to derive from the Timaeus. But I want to argue that this dialogue is like Heraclitus’s oracle: it both conceals and reveals his attitudes toward the physical world; and these attitudes do not turn out to be so scornful of the feminine and the material as is usually held. The Timaeus presents an intriguing fusion of metaphysical and moral theory.4 But just what is its moral message? Does it tell the story of humanity’s fall into an imperfect realm flawed by material necessity, or does it depict nature as ordered and beautiful, offering a path to moral illumination? To answer these questions requires considering Plato’s puzzling insistence that this dialogue is an eikos muthos. Is this dialogue, like nature itself, a likeness with merits, capable of revelation? Or is it a deceptive semblance? We must attend to multiple clues to clarify Plato’s ambivalent attitude toward gender in this dialogue. The opening conversation reminds us of plans for an ideal state wherein women are equal, but in the Timaeus’ cosmological scheme, they are clearly inferior. And the “female” contributor to the creation of the cosmos, the Receptacle, is indeed treated with disgust and dismay. I will proceed by reviewing a set of six moral incoherencies in this dialogue, many involving issues of gender.5 They fall into two broad groups. The first group are “cosmological-psychological”; the remaining ones have to do with ontology and epistemology. For reasons of space I will just sketch some of these basic problem without discussing their resolution. The topic or passage that feminists have focused on involving the Receptacle arises within what I call the fourth inconsistency. If we locate this as part of a series, we begin to see the limitations of existing approaches to understanding this dialogue.


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1. COSMOLOGICAL-PSYCHOLOGICAL INCOHERENCIES 1.1 Incoherency 1. Souls and Gender Hierarchy The opening conversation that is external to the Timaeus’s cosmological account, and that allegedly takes place on the day before, reminds us of the participants having discussed plans for an ideal state wherein women are equal. This appears to refer to a sketch like that given in the Republic, but scholars disagree about whether such a reference is intended, just as they disagree about the dating of the Timaeus.6 In any case, in the Timaeus’ cosmological scheme, the souls of women are clearly inferior. The framing dialogue (17a-20d) of this story recounts a previous day’s discussion of an ideal state much like that of the Republic where the women will be educated to be leaders and philosophers alongside the men, just as in the Republic.7 Within Timaeus’s story, however, there is no room for any rational capacities or equal rule for women. Their souls are distinctly inferior, a subordinate stage allowing for the flawed development of men’s lives during the first stage of incarnation (42b). Inhabiting such a soul is fit punishment as a second-round reincarnation for errant men “who led lives that were cowardly or immoral” (90e6-91a1). First men’s souls and bodies are created, and after some perform badly, they “molt” into women. This raises questions not only about the nature of women (and whether it makes any sense to ground an ideal political system in that nature), but about the potential for revision and improvement of human nature generally. This problem seems connected to that raised within the next incoherence. 1.2 Incoherency 2. Zoological Hierarchy and the Recycling of Souls. The Timaeus describes dual processes of the flux of souls: upward cycles of the good or pure souls to their birth-stars, as well as the downward path of some bad or corrupt souls into animals. Both processes seem permanent and irreversible, and the supply of souls that the Demi-Urge initially created is fixed in number (41d4-8). Yet Plato also writes as if these processes of cosmic metempsychosis will continue forever. Since some of the pathways that souls follow seem to lead to an irreversible position in the cosmic hierarchy, then continual metempsychosis would require an ongoing supply of fresh souls. Plato writes as if the souls that have fallen have chances to recuperate their lost moral status so as to be redeemed. But it is difficult to see how a fallen soul could ever rise. The soul of the reincarnated man, once within a

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woman or a beast, has little control over its bodily desires or reactions to the environment. The lowest, or fourth, sort of souls, for example, living in water are said to have been “most foolish and stupid of all...unworthy to breathe the pure air, because their souls were polluted with every sort of transgression...in penalty for the last extreme of folly” (92b). Despite this, Plato immediately notes that “then and now” (tote kai nun, c1) creatures shift place in the zoological scheme “with the loss or gain of understanding or of folly” (92c1-3). Even more, the responsibility seems squarely to fall on them. At 42c4-d2 he hints that they can somehow choose “to allow the motion of the Same...to subdue all that multitude of riotous and irrational feelings.” The loss of fresh souls to be recycled also appears inevitable if we consider the upward path taken by virtuous souls. They can be separated from the lower realms in reward for their virtue, returning to their star to live a happy life there (41, 42b3-5). Recently James V. Robinson has tried to argue that the soul, even once on a star, retains a body and is still tripartite, i.e., one including emotions and appetites.8 He points out that this is not so counterintuitive as it might at first seem: the World-Soul and the created gods all have bodies, and something must be needed to govern the star’s body. Even at the level of the heavenly bodies, some imperfection creeps in at the earliest stages of cosmic design: that is, the planets do not follow uniform and smooth circular motion (see 34a; on this see also Ballew, 203-4). I do not think that Robinson’s interpretation succeeds; I agree with criticisms brought against it by Andrew S. Mason.9 Mason argues, sensibly, that the lower parts of soul only exist when the soul is in a particular sort of body; they are tied to a particular body and die with that body (92). Furthermore, the soul of a lofty human on a star does not actually have to interact with the physical stuff of that star, because stars have souls of their own (95). Yet it remains an interesting problem to juxtapose this escape upward to the problem of irreversible downward mobility and to ask where the new supply of souls might come from.10 An additional, related problem is that there is a sort of Principle of Plenitude at work in the Timaeus. The existence of animals like birds and fish represents a fall of grace from flawed human status, but Timaeus, the man, asserts that the existence of a variety of forms of life, including birds and animals, is in itself a good thing. This was done “in order that this creation resemble the model of the perfect living creature” (39e7-9). And he writes that the various range of mortal creatures actually must be created: “Unless they are created the world will be imperfect (ateles), as it will not have in it every kind of living creature which it must have if it is to


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be perfect” (41b7-c2). This sits badly with the judgment about the loathsome moral status assigned to creatures living in the water. 1.3 Incoherency 3. Moral Sanctions. In this dialogue, Plato upholds the Socratic anti-akrasia line: “No one is willingly bad” (87d7-e1). Yet people are punished for their misdoings. Similarly, people are rewarded when they are good, yet their control over their behavior seems limited.11 Folly (anoia) is disorder in the soul, and is due either to madness (mania) or ignorance (amathia) (86b-d; see Cornford, 346). Ignorance is not the soul’s own fault, but is due to the shock of a soul being put into a body (44a4-7). The lesser gods made mortal parts “containing terrible and necessary feelings” (69c-d) such as pleasure, pain, fear, and passion, which can render a soul “sick and senseless” (86d1-2). Hence “incontinence in pleasure is not justly made a reproach” (86d5-6). And even if we cannot blame the body for our wickedness, we can always blame “society” or our parents! Bad government, poor parenting, or a weak education are often at fault (87a7b6).12 Given all this, there is a problem about punishing non-responsible bad souls. “Punishment” certainly seems to be the right description too, given Plato’s tone throughout.13 Because the bad person has his “attention and effort...centered on appetite and ambition, all his thoughts are bound to be mortal, and he can hardly fail, insofar as it is possible, to become entirely mortal” (90b1-5). Even more strongly, Plato writes about condemnation of the worst souls in the final passage of the dialogue from 90e1 to 92c9, especially in passages like the one I quoted above where he describes the men who were turned into fishes and shellfish; remember it concludes that “they live in the depths as a punishment for the depth of their stupidity” (92b1-c1 passim). Having outlined this basic set of cosmological-psychological incoherencies, I turn next to the underlying problems about ontology and epistemology, where we will encounter the notorious, much-disputed notion of the Receptacle.

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2. ONTOLOGICAL/EPISTEMOLOGICAL INCOHERENCIES 2.1 Incoherency 4. The Receptacle. The Receptacle is described by Timaeus as the womb of cosmic creation. It is treated with disgust or dismay, and it is tied with Necessity as a contributing cause of evil or limitation. However, it is still essential in order for anything else to exist, including things that are good. To try to pin down the moral nature of the Receptacle, we can consider the various metaphors through which Timaeus describes it after introducing the notion of this at 49a6: mirror, nurse or mother, gold, base for scented ointments, wax or other soft substance, and winnowing-basket (49-50).14 The metaphors of mother or nurse might naturally suggest that the Receptacle plays a useful, benevolent, role for the cosmos: these signify after all what gives birth and provides nourishment. Such would be a mistaken interpretation, however, given the number of negative assessments Timaeus has to make here (especially from 50d2-51b6) about this “difficult and obscure form” (49a3-4) and the “bastard” nature of this birthing process (see 52b2)! Besides, Plato in other works is at great pains to emphasize the negligible contributions of the female element and of mothers in general to their offspring.15 The metaphors of wax and a base for ointments emphasize that the Receptacle’s nature is to have no nature. And here we arrive at the passage (52a8) about the characterless, eternal female space (khora) of cosmic generation which has been the focus of feminist attention. Reasons for this, as for psychoanalytic or deconstructive interest in this text, are obvious. For the deconstructors, the passages about the khora are important as attempts to describe something inherently indescribable. They are “logocentric” moves—a founding-point for western philosophy as a whole. For example, Butler writes, “The feminine, to use a catachresis, is domesticated and rendered unintelligible within a phallogocentrism that claims to be selfconstituting” (39). The deconstructors raise real questions about the paradoxical nature of any description of this impossible object/subject, ones I shall return to below in addressing the dialogue’s status as eikos muthos. Typically, the Receptacle passages, with their metaphors emphasizing its naturelessness, passivity, and plasticity, are interpreted as excluding the feminine from the founding of philosophy as a discipline. They also exclude the feminine as a source of rationality or knowledge. Luce Irigaray returns again and again to the Timaeus’s metaphor of the mirror; in Butler’s word, Irigaray is “interrogating the mirror” (27). Irigaray speaks about “crossing back through the mirror” (77), or about finding


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what is on the back of the silvered front side of this unusual mirror which only reflects the male conceptual order. Because the view of this mirror is so limited, she refers to it as a “flat mirror” (129) and says instead there is need for “a curved mirror folded back onto itself—the concave mirror” (155). A sort of curved mirror became subject and source of the title of her first major work, Speculum of the Other Woman (especially in the “Plato’s Hystera” section). Butler sums up Irigaray’s remarkable and unique style of reading classical texts well by commenting “If the task is not a loyal or proper ‘reading’ of Plato, then perhaps it is a kind of over-reading which mimes and exposes the speculative excess in Plato” (36). The problem that writers like Irigaray and Butler are zeroing in on and seeking to resolve is an important one, but it is also one that has not been uniquely noticed by feminists or deconstructors: the ontological status of the realm of becoming, or the reality of the offspring created when the Forms are imitated by the Receptacle. Butler asks, “Where does this instantiation take place? Is there a place, a site, where this reproduction occurs, a medium through which the transformation from form to sensible object occurs?” (39-40). Are images in the Receptacle-mirror “real,” and can we talk sensibly about them, or indeed about the world of flux generally?16 To try to answer this question, commentators in the Anglo-American analytic tradition have tended to focus on another nearby metaphor of plasticity, the gold analogy. There is considerable disagreement in the literature about how to construe this important passage. The gold analogy (50a4-b5) follows upon and illustrates a key discussion (49a6-50a4) of what we can and cannot name or identify about proto-elements in the Receptacle. Mary Louise Gill, for example, usefully distinguishes two main lines of interpretation of the key text here from 49c-50b.17 I find a similar fault in the approaches of the Continental feminists and analytic philosophers alike: too many claims are made about “Plato’s view” on the basis of an isolated passage singled out from a well-woven textual series of metaphors, all presented by a spokesman who cannot himself be identified with Plato as author of this text. Various conclusions are reached by analytic commentators reading the gold analogy about “Plato’s view of the realm of flux,” but the focus of Plato’s own discussion in this particular passage is very narrow and specific. He is talking not about materiate entities in general, but only about the four elements or physical archai, in the specific context, that of the precosmos before they have been rationalized into ordered shapes by the Demiurge.18 My question for all the interpreters is, rather, what exactly about the Receptacle blocks intelligibility? Why, if intelligibility is so blocked, would Plato say that it is necessary for us to pursue advancement and knowledge of Forms through

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our efforts to understand the physical realm even by tracing it back to these earliest stages—and naming them? Timaeus’s discussion of the elements in the precosmos is followed not only by the famous gold analogy but by another metaphor that has been surprisingly neglected by all the commentators. Plato also likens the Receptacle to a winnowing-basket (plokanon, 52c2-5) in an important and fascinating metaphor. The term and its explanation make it clear that the winnowing-basket is a useful tool for cleaning corn; hence the metaphor starts out on a positive note. As such a basket, the Receptacle contains within itself the motions of the four proto-elements (which are also distinguished within it by this very motion). Plato conveys both that the Receptacle itself was shaking, and that it contained elements that also made it sway and shake (see 52e4-5, 53a2-4). Due to this activity, the four kinds are separated into both regions and natures by the Receptacle (52e-53a).19 Ironically, this positive metaphor might do much to serve the aims of feminist commentators, because here, even before the activity of God-theFather, the Receptacle displays activity, has regions, and has things in it with certain “powers” or natures.20 Thus, this metaphor directly contradicts both the featurelessness and passivity that one might infer about the feminine from the “plastic” analogy. Beyond this, we can actually find the movements of the Receptacle cited as positive models we should emulate later on within Plato’s discussion of someone taking proper care of the body: But if he will imitate what we have called the foster-mother and nurse of the universe and never, if possible, allow the body to rest in torpor; if he will keep it in motion and, by perpetually giving it a shake, constantly hold in check the internal and external motions in a natural balance; if by thus shaking it in moderation, he will bring into orderly arrangement, one with another, such as we described in speaking of the universe, those affections and particles that wander according to their affinities about the body; then he will not be leaving foe ranged by foe to engender warfare and disease in his body, but will have friend ranged by the side of friend for the production of health. (88d6-89a1, tr. Cornford, 351)

It may, admittedly, to be going too far to say that the Receptacle’s shaking provides some sort of model of a physically healthy basic state on which the Demiurge can proceed to work, just as our rationality must start from a healthy body. Still, this is a noteworthy passage for its much more positive attitude to the female generative source and to the physical in general. If shaking can make “friend join with friend” within our bodies, perhaps this is how we should regard the effects of regional separation of proto-elements in the precosmic Receptacle.


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2.2 Incoherence 5. Forms are good, but what about Necessity? On the one hand, the embodiment of Forms is constrained by Necessity so as to result in unfortunate implications. In the physical realm, the realization of perfection is limited by Necessity. On the other hand, Necessity supplies the material needed for a creation that is good since it stimulates our moral growth. Steven Strange has advanced a careful interpretation of this factor in the cosmos, and so I want to mention his account here. 21 Timaeus’s “Errant Cause” (planomene aitia) resembles chance. Necessity also involves formal and material causality (Strange, 33), and describes the status of things within the Receptacle—things that have more features than the featureless Receptacle would on its own.22 We may distinguish Reason and Necessity according to their relation to the good. In the domain of Reason, Strange explains, “the emphasis is on what is intrinsically good and not good merely instrumentally or with reference to something else” (28). Necessity involves the realm of “purely material properties” which in and of themselves are neutral in the ontological value schema. But where Reason and Necessity intersect, or where Reason “persuades” Necessity,23 “instead, [what results] are good as instrumental means that allow the human animal to survive and pursue happiness” (29). Such goods are constrained by materials. For example, although the gods choose to make flesh to protect the human skeleton, if this flesh is too thick it will dull sensation and slow down movement (74e75c, Strange 33).24 Summing up his Aristotelian line of interpretation, Strange remarks, “Necessity is a form of explanation that accounts for properties of phenomena as unavoidable consequences of the embodiment of Forms.” (34).25 But even this charitable construal of Plato’s views seems to confuse Timaeus’s own story. At times Strange writes as if embodiment per se is the problem introduced by necessity, but then he cannot be right to emphasize at other times that the real limitations concern co-embodiment: “Necessity comes into play only when these materials are combined: it is not the properties in themselves that are incompatible with perfection but their joint embodiment” (33, emphasis added). Strange’s construal makes the limitations of Necessity revolve around the instantiation of Forms. Plato himself does not really do this. Rather, at the very earliest stage—before it gets “persuaded” by Reason—Necessity is invoked in order to describe material-cum-formal features of the protoelements. These material features themselves may put limits on the instantiation of Forms (let alone on their co-instantiation). But Necessity should not be understood to involve just such issues. Notice that at 52a-d

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Timaeus clearly asserts that Being, Space, and Becoming exist even before the heaven came into being, i.e., even before the Demiurge and his helpergods began to rationalize the elements in the image of the Forms. Necessity exists then, too. What should we conclude about the moral status of Necessity, either on its own or as persuaded by Reason—whether we are speaking of the protoelements or of Forms’ (co)insantiation? Strange argues that it is either neutral, turned to instrumental good, or at worst inadvertently evil. But this general view neglects an important moral dimension of Plato’s physical theory. We have seen earlier that what I called a Principle of Plenitude (41b7-c2) suggests that the creation may be an in itself good. Can it, after all, serve in any way as a means to an end the Demi-urge might have? Despite being in some sense source of evil, the physical realm is also presented in this dialogue as good. Strange half-recognizes this, but casts it as a feature of epistemology not metaphysics. He notes that for Timaeus, the physical world is treated as essential for humans’ moral progress: we must begin by studying it in order to advance our understanding to the Forms. “Plato says that understanding of the divine causes can only be obtained through grasp of the lower kind, presumably by some process of inference” (30). Here Strange is referring to Plato’s discussion of the usefulness of sight at 47a7-8, as well as to passages at 69a and at 46d-e. At 69a, Plato says that “apart from the necessary, those other objects of our serious study cannot by themselves be perceived or communicated, nor can we in any other way have part or lot in them” (Cornford, 279).26 And again, Plato writes at 90d1-7 that we may give our soul proper food and motions by attending to the motions and harmonies of the universe. These passages combined suggest a much more benevolent role for Necessity and the physical realm in general than one would ever guess on the basis of reading about the negative connotations of the Receptacle as khora alone. 2.3 Incoherency 6. Eikos Muthos. The nature of the Timaeus as Platonic dialogue or doctrine is indeterminable: the “eikos muthos” is both (deceptive) semblance and (veridical) likeness. The initial description of the dialogue as eikos muthos occurs in 27d-28. At 29c1-3 Timaeus comments that “an account of what is made in the image of that other, but is only a likeness, will itself be but likely.”27 Plato devoted a fair amount of attention in all his works, and especially in the Sophist, to the subject of likenesses or semblances.28 But the most


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obvious place to turn for insight into what he might have in mind in referring an eikos muthos is to the well-known Divided Line passage in Republic VI, 509d1-511e5. Here I assume basic familiarity with the Line analogy, and focus on its intriguing use of images or likenesses to describe and differentiate its various subdivisions.29 The lowest or the first section of the Line is compared to the epistemology of the visible realm (509e1-510a3), which concerns likenesses (eikones) such as shadows and reflections (fantasmata) in water. And the next section, denoting the visible realm (510a5-6), involves things in the world from which these likenesses come: flora, fauna, and artifacts. Moving up the scale of clarity, we come to another portion of the higher “half” of the Line. (Keep in mind that the length of this portion is said to be equal to the length of the previously mentioned portion.) Here, Socrates says (510b4-5): “If the mind wants to explore the first subdivision, it can do so only by using those former originals as likenesses (hos eikosin) (tr Waterfield). Finally, of course, at the highest stage, the mind is said to know and study the Forms themselves, “having no involvement with likenesses” (aneu ton peri ekeino eikonon) (510b6-9). In the Divided Line analogy of the Republic, then, Plato makes it clear that we can have genuine knowledge of some things whose visible likenesses we think we know in our regular visible world. Unfortunately, his only examples concern geometrical entities. His basic idea is that geometers could study the pure forms of geometry on their own, but that they are forced to do so instead by means of visible likenesses. This seems to involve a sudden “dip” from the highest level of pure, non-hypothetical thinking straight down to the next-to-lowest level, where we are said to focus on likenesses in a way that involves deception or mistakes. Socrates explains (I append my amplificatory comments in brackets): So it was objects of this type [e.g., the Form of Square] that I was describing as belonging to the intelligible realm [the highest realm], with the rider that the mind can explore them only by taking things for granted [the next highest realm], and that its goal is not a starting-point, because it is incapable of changing direction and rising above the things it is taking for granted. And I went on to say that it used as likenesses those very things [material things] which are themselves the originals of a lower order of likenesses [mere appearances], and that relative to the likenesses [of Level Four], the originals [Level Two] command respect and admiration for their distinctness. (511a3-8, tr. Waterfield, with my commentary added)

It is helpful to keep in mind that the entire project of the Republic is itself a project of working with—studying, considering, learning through— images, since the state is used as a large image of the soul that is the ostensible subject of the initial dialogue and debate about whether a just person is happy. The Republic could itself be described as a progression up the ladder of the divided line from common and vulgar misconceptions, or

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false images of justice, toward the kind of superior images that at least constitute dianoia (or thought about truth at the second highest level).30 Thus Plato has a very complex, and not inevitably negative, view of the value of images. Let us return from the Republic to consider the status of the eikos muthos in the Timaeus vis-à-vis the epistemology Plato develops in his analogy of the Divided Line. Things studied by geometers could include natural kinds, perhaps the planets or the elements. I see the Timaeus as presenting just such speculation. After all, planets might be seen as belonging to the realm of the intelligible (Level 2), since they are images of Forms (of Sameness, Difference, etc., i.e., of things at Level 1). They can be known as such, but can also be seen (Level 3) or merely reflected (Level 4). Similarly, we might suggest that given the extent of geometrical analysis employed in the account of construction of the physical elements, then we might locate these sections of the Timaeus as a whole within Level Two of the Divided Line. That is, the analytic construction of the elements provides an intelligible account of them, and they are visible things (Level 3) which can be understood also as mere reflections (Level 4). My speculations in the paragraph above locate a fair amount of Timaeus’s story at Level Two of the Republic’s schema (dianoia)—a level with clear epistemological validity. (We are, after all, within the realm of the intelligible, not merely the visible.) Timaeus is justly cautious in warning Socrates about possible inconsistencies that he may end up with (29c4-7), but he is nonetheless surprisingly confident in asserting the credibility of much of his tale. At 29c7-8 he says he will furnish an account “no less likely than any other,” at 29c8-d3 he adds that it is fitting “as we are only humans to accept the likely story and look for nothing further.”31 Timaeus says repeatedly that the level of our knowledge and our accounts corresponds to that of the object known or described.32 He also notes significant differences among “likelihoods.” Some higher degree of likelihood applies, say, to his account of the planets than to that of the four elements, and probably more here than, say, to the discussion of humans’ bodily parts. To recap what I am trying to take from the Divided Line: the mere fact that Timaeus is dealing with images does not suffice to show that his story is untrustworthy. Nor does it show that each and every component of his cosmological story, including the Receptacle, must be viewed with suspicion and dismay. We have seen that even in the realm of the intelligibles there may be an appropriate use of likenesses. Some of the things described in the Timaeus are clearly presented as imitations of Forms. But Timaeus himself purports to go beyond mere belief. Could the “eikos” in his “eikos muthos” be a verbal reminder that the geometrical


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understanding of the intelligible realm is after all a legitimate form of knowledge, despite the fact that the geometers are said to employ images? They treat their models and diagrams as likenesses, when these things have likenesses themselves, in fact (that is, shadows and reflections in water), but they are actually trying to see squares and so on in themselves, which only thought can “see.” There may have been some shifts from the Republic to the Timaeus. The geometers in the Republic care only about their squares and circles; they employ images as a necessary means of reflection upon Forms, and these images are like the famous Wittgensteinian ladder that is dispensed with once it has been mounted. But it would make no sense for Timaeus to engage in a cosmological story if his only interest were in the Forms. Why bother? This is like Parmenides warning people away from the wrongheaded path of Is and Is Not but at the same time advancing his own dualistic cosmology. Unlike Parmenides, however, Plato has Timaeus describe the physical world, and our sensory systems in general, as part of a necessary process of moral and intellectual illumination: our eyes, for example, serve the noble purpose of uplifting our thoughts and minds to the stars and higher things (46e-47e). Through understanding the stars, he says, we may heal the damage done when we were embodied: “We repair the damage done at birth to the circuits of our head, and so restore understanding and what is understood to their original likeness to each other.” We reach a moral goal through natural philosophy: when we pursue such inquiry, we are “making man’s life like what the gods designed” (90d). Thus, cosmological inquiry in the Timaeus seems to have a status unplanned for in the Divided Line framework of the Republic. (It does so not least by incorporating the goodness that is so conspicuously missing from the analogy there.33) It is worth noting that the Timaeus may actually—despite, or even granted, its puzzles and incoherencies—provide a case for the value (including the moral value) of the material world and of doing natural philosophy. I see it as a prelude to empirical scientific inquiry as Aristotle is to develop it. Timaeus tells us that, “When a man, for the sake of recreation, lays aside discourse about eternal things and gains an innocent pleasure from the consideration of such plausible accounts of becoming, he will add to his life a sober and sensible pastime” (59c7-d22, tr. Cornford). We are not very far here from Aristotle’s famous admonition to his students in Parts of Animals I, 5 (644b23-645a37) not to be repulsed by the lowly creatures they are about to study. Interpreting Plato is a notoriously complex and controversial business. I have charged that the many feminist critics who lambaste Plato for his degrading conception of cosmic femininity in the Timaeus are poor readers

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who fail even to try to understand the dialogue as a whole, let alone in relation to Plato’s broader views and literary strategies. I do not mean my reading here to signal either a prohibition against alternative methods of reading Plato (what power in any case could such a prohibition have?) or a redemptive justification of him for proto-feminist views. My aim has been, rather, to suggest an alternative reading of the Timaeus that I think is richer and more subtle, and to offer it as of some interest to feminists and others who seek to understand and assess our philosophical heritage. Grave charges have been made against Plato as leading astray the entire history of western metaphysics primarily on the basis of this one dialogue—and not even on the basis of all of it, just one short passage. The fact that I think these charges are wrong won’t necessarily absolve Plato of the taint of sexism, or undo other damage about his philosophical contempt for female principles and bodies. But neither should we convict Plato of silly and superficial errors on the basis of readings that do violence to his texts. Superficial errors can seem too easy to correct; subtle errors necessitate subtle strategies of response.34

NOTES 1

Of course the famous critics I am thinking of here include Martin Heidegger, and Richard Rorty, among others. 2 For discussion of Plato’s sexism, see the essays by Gregory Vlastos and Julia Annas in Nancy Tuana, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Plato (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994). 3 See Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York and London: Routledge, 1993); Jacques Derrida, Positions, Alan Bass, ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978) and On the Name (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995); Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, tr. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985); Julia Kristeva, “The Semiotic Chora Ordering the Drives,” in Revolution in Poetic Language (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984); and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine (London and New York: London, 1993). 4 I agree with Steven Strange’s assessment: “It is not mere physiologizing: like the myths of Plato’s earlier dialogues, it is a moral exhortation” (35). Strange, “The Double Explanation in the Timaeus,” Ancient Philosophy 5 (1985), 25-39. 5 I use the term “incoherency” loosely here, to group together a set of problems that seem puzzling or perhaps paradoxical; they may not in fact all turn out to be logical incoherencies in the strictest sense. 6 See Waterfield’s introduction to his translation of the dialogue; on the dating issue, see G.E.L. Owen, “The Place of the Timaeus in Plato’s Corpus.” 7 “Their natures should be formed to the same harmonious blend of qualities as those of men; and they should all be given a share in men’s employments of every sort, in war as well as in their general mode of life” (18c; compare Republic 456a). 8 James V. Robinson, “The Tripartite Soul in the Timaeus,” Phronesis XXVII (1990), 103110.

SCHEMES AND SCENES OF READING THE TIMAEUS 9

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Andrew Mason, “Immortality in the Timaeus,” Phronesis XXXIXII (1994): 90-97. Mason also makes the intriguing claim that the souls’ descent into incarnation is a “willing act of obedience to the divine will” rather than a “fall” (96-7). 11 For reasons of space, I do not discuss this problem here. This is not the whole of the problem, though; there is also a difficulty concerning our moral responsibility for good actions. See Strange, p. 32. 12 Mary Margaret MacKenzie’s discussion of this passage about vice as disease (Plato on Punishment, 176-8) is particularly helpful. She compares it to the view of the Protagoras 349ff. (177) and also notes inconsistencies between the treatment of vice as disease and the passage’s “striking intellectualist overtones” (177). She concludes that, “The odd experiment of the Timaeus...is, in the end, a failure.” MacKenzie is also useful on the role of parents in moral education; see p. 143, n. 30. 13 See MacKenzie: “At the same time...the criminal continues to be held responsible for his misfortune,” 145 (writing on Timaeus 86e2). 14 I here follow Mary Louise Gill, who lists a number of these in her article, “Matter and Flux in Plato’s Timaeus.” The mirror metaphor is not, Gill tells us, explicitly used (49), yet it is hard to avoid bringing it to bear since it is so commonly used in Plato’s other dialogues to describe relations of material reality to the Forms. To think about the Receptacle’s moral status as mirror, we might think about whether the mirroring is itself good. What makes it bad, i.e., what makes Plato criticize it elsewhere, are the imperfections of the process. Yet the mere presence of images is good in some ways in this dialogue. The Demiurge creates likenesses out of his goodness, and we shall see that various among these images will even prove necessary in inspiring us along the path toward discovery of Forms. 15 See for example Page duBois, “The Platonic Appropriation of Reproduction,” in Feminist Interpretations of Plato, ed. Nancy Tuana, pp. 139-56. Other essays in this volume are also relevant. 16 For example, see Butler’s own suggested reading, 49-53. She criticizes Irigaray for an analysis which “has considered not the materiality of sex, but the sex of materiality” (49). 17 On the “Traditional View,” Plato legitimates talk about physical phenomena. He says about the elements in the Receptacle, “Do not call z ‘x’ but call z ‘y.’” We should not call the fire of the Receptacle (or the precosmos) ‘fire’ but call it ‘fire-like’ or ‘fiery’ or ‘such as fire’. On the “Alternative View,” Plato prohibits talk about material entities. On this line, the key phrase in question says that we should “not call this x ‘z,’ but call y ‘z’.” In other words, we should not call the proto-fire ‘Fire’ but should only call the Form of Fire ‘Fire.’ Similarly, we should not call this gold ring a ring, but call it rather something like the image of a ring. Only the Form of Ring, so to speak, would be a ring. Gill, quoting from Cherniss, explains, “About this (the water) nothing ought to be said because it is an indistinguishable part of the phenomenal flux.” Names like ‘water’ and ‘fire’ should be reserved for items signified by the to toiouton phrases—distinct and self-identical characteristics (40). 18 Gill does seem to see this point but does not emphasize it enough. She writes that the Receptacle is distinctly not matter for the elements (nor is it matter for images)—so this is a problem with the gold analogy. She says, “Its role is not relevant to the construction of physical bodies,” and instead it is only relevant in explaining elemental motion to different regions (48). 19 Cornford comments, “Plato’s Recipient is not partly empty but completely filled with the sensible qualities or ‘powers’” (202). 20 Hence Gill reminds us of the limits of the gold or plastic analogy: the proto-elements are features of the Receptacle, but not made of it. See Gill 39: after emphasizing that “the entire passage from 48e2-53b is an account of the precosmos”; she says we are in the realm of Necessity. 10

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Strange sums the problem up by saying that, “Necessity accounts for all evil, even though Necessity itself is not evil since it will also be the cause of all things that are neither good nor evil” (34). See also Cherniss’s discussion of various sources of evil. 22 To the extent that Necessity may involve or originate in the Receptacle, I will address its rather complex moral status as a separate matter just below. 23 We should remember that Plato’s language in describing relations between Reason and Necessity is poetic. Reason is said to “persuade” Necessity (47e-48b), and Necessity to “help” Reason (68e-69a). 24 The locus classicus for Aristotle on hypothetical necessity is, of course, Physics II,9. Another obviously interesting comparison is with the important passages about methodology in Parts of Animals I, 1 and 5. 25 See Strange, p. 33: Necessity as a constraint “can be referred to the mutual entailments and exclusions of Forms: as Plato says, the Necessity is displayed in the logow [Greek font] or account of the situation (74e4-5)” (footnote omitted). 26 So Strange comments, “Necessity is prior to Reason in the order of discovery and—at least within the framework of the creation story—of time, since it ‘precedes’ Reason’s creation of time.” (30) 27 Cornford and other commentators seem undecided about how to take Timaeus’s qualifier. Cornford remarks that “The Timaeus is a poem” (31-2), yet he criticizes Taylor for dismissing the dialogue as myth rather than science. Almost perversely, Cornford tries to have it both ways: he defends Plato for bona fide cosmological/scientific aspirations, yet admits that “there remains an irreducible element of poetry, which refuses to be translated into the language of scientific prose.” (32) See Cornford, pp. 28-32; on eikos, see 30. 28 Thus in The Sophist Plato distinguishes various types of images, some of which have more epistemological status than others. First, at 265b, he distinguishes human from divine production. Then, from 266d-e, he distinguishes things having to do with the production of “likenesses” (eikastikon) from those concerning “semblances” (fantastikori) (1014). 29 Plato begins this passage with the familiar distinction between the two realms of the intelligible (to men noetou genous te kai topou) and the visible (to d’au oratou). He then lays out a well-known geometrical illustration of a line divided into two unequal sections, with the greater representing the intelligible, the lesser the visible. Each section is further subdivided using the same proportion or measure. The neat two-way division seems now to signify four levels of differential clarity in our knowledge or belief states. Commentators such as Annas find a troubling inconsistency between the general two-fold dichotomy between intelligible/visible and the fourfold distinction which implies more levels of epistemic clarity. See Annas, An Introduction to Plato’s Republic, 249. The Line has four levels, as follows (Socrates begins with the lowest order): (Eikasia) (509e-510a) Level 4. “Picture thinking” or conjecture (Pistis) (510a) Level 3. Belief Level 2. Geometrical Understanding (Dianoia) (510b) Noesis Level 1. Reason/Dialectic 30 Here I am in close agreement with the argument advanced by Nicholas D. Smith, in “Plato’s Divided Line,” Ancient Philosophy 16: 25-46. 1996; see also Smith’s “How the Prisoners in Plato’s Cave are ‘Like Us’”, Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy 13 (1998). 31 Similar emphases on the positive believability of his likely story may be found at 48d2-3, d6, and at 59c-d and 68d2. 32 “Our narrative is bound to reflect much of our own contingent and accidental state” (34c24); and yet once more, at 29b, we see this same general line, that the account of what is abiding is stable, while the account of what is a likeness is only likely. (Compare 29c: as


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reality is to becoming, so is truth to belief.) Over and over again, certainty and permanent objects match up with certain accounts, likely accounts with likenesses and impermanent objects. 33 It would be most interesting to pursue comparisons to Republic Book X’s Myth of Er and its account of metempsychosis. 34 Earlier versions of this paper were read at the Plato Symposium at the University of Arizona and at Texas Tech University; I am grateful to participants at both occasions for questions and comments, and particularly to Nicholas Smith and Alessandra Fussi, my commentator in Tucson.

REFERENCES Annas, Julia. An Introduction to Plato’s Republic. Oxford : Clarendon Press, and New York: Oxford University Press, 1981. Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. New York and London: Routledge, 1993. Cornford, F.M. Plato’s Cosmology. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill,1975. Derrida, Jacques. On the Name. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995. Derrida, Jacques. Positions. Edited by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. duBois, Page. “The Platonic Appropriation of Reproduction.” In Feminist Interpretations of Plato, edited by Nancy Tuana, 139-56. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994. Gill, Mary Louise. “Matter and Flux in Plato’s Timaeus.” Phronesis 1987, 34-53. Irigaray, Luce. Speculum of the Other Woman, translated by Gillian C. Gill. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985. Kristeva, Julia. “The Semiotic Chora Ordering the Drives.” In Revolution in Poetic Language. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. MacKenzie, Mary Margaret. Plato on Punishment. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1981. Mason, Andrew. “Immortality in the Timaeus.” Phronesis XXXIXII (1994): 90-97. Owen, G.E.L. “The Place of the Timaeus in Plato’s Dialogues.” In Studies in Plato’s Metaphysics, edited by R.E. Allen, 313-38. London: Routledge, Kegan Paul, 1965. Plato. Timaeus and Critias (Plato’s Timaeus and Critias) translated by H.P.D. Lee. London: Penguin, 1977. Robinson, James V. “The Tripartite Soul in the Timaeus.” Phronesis XXVII (1990): 103110. Smith, Nicholas D. “How the Prisoners in Plato’s Cave are “Like Us.” Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy 13: (1998). Smith, Nicholas D. “Plato’s Divided Line.” Ancient Philosophy 16 (1996): 25-46. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Outside in the Teaching Machine. London and New York: Routledge, 1993. Strange, Steven. “The Double Explanation in the Timaeus.” Ancient Philosophy 5 (1985): 25-39. Tuana, Nancy and William Cowling. “The presence and abuse of the feminine in Plato’s philosophy.” In Feminist Interpretations of Plato, edited by Nancy Tuana, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994. Vlastos, Gregory. “Was Plato a Feminist?” In Feminist Interpretations of Plato, edited by Nancy Tuana. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994.

NIETZSCHE’S FEMINIZATION OF METAPHYSICS AND ITS SIGNIFICANCE FOR THEORIES OF GENDER DIFFERENCE1

Sigridur Thorgeirsdottir (University of Iceland‚ Iceland)

“Nietzsche and Women”. Ever since the beginning of the reception of Nietzsche’s philosophy in the last decade of the 19th century this has been a difficult and embarrassing topic. When visualizing Nietzsche‚ one sees the dark cloud of misogyny hanging over his head. One only needs to be reminded of his infamous aphorisms on women in Beyond Good and Evil.2 These statements about the cognitive and moral inferiority of women are basically a faithful reiteration of Arthur Schopenhauer’s fanatic pamphlet on the inferiority of women‚ but Schopenhauer was certainly one of 19th century’s nastiest misogynists.3 Despite these facts Nietzsche’s philosophy has not been interpreted solely as antagonistic to women. German feminists at the turn of the last century chose to sidestep the misogynist aspects of his philosophy of women. In his philosophy they found instead ideological support for their emancipatory projects. The feminists Hedwig Dohm‚ Helene Lange‚ Lili Braun and Helene Stöcker‚ to name a few‚ considered Nietzsche’s theories of the self-overcoming of man to be extremely congenial to the liberation of women. Carol Diethe has done a careful study to show the influence Nietzsche’s philosophy had on these early German feminists.4 Their specific implementation of Nietzsche’s philosophy has not been carried on or developed further‚ even though the notion of emancipation and selfrealization found in his philosophy are basic to feminist endeavors. In the last two decades there has been a resurgence of feminist philosophizing that draws upon certain aspects of Nietzsche’s theory of the 51 L. Alanen and C. Witt (eds.)‚ Feminist Reflections on the History of Philosophy‚ 51-68. © 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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self. His reflections on the construction of identity and the creation of the self are fundamental to contemporary feminist theories of gender difference and gender identity.5 Such theories are at the core of current feminist philosophy. Nietzsche’s critique of essentialist conceptions of identity are the basis for any critique or deconstruction of essentialist or ontological conceptions of the difference between men and women‚ i.e. what is conceived to be the essential or innate‚ unchangeable nature of women or men. Jacques Derrida brought attention to the relevance of Nietzsche for feminist theorizing on gender difference with his Spurs—Nietzsche’s Styles.6 Social-constructivist theories of gender difference‚ for example Judith Butler’s well known Gender Trouble‚ are to a great extent in line with Derrida’s elaboration of Nietzsche’s criticism of essentialist notions of gender difference.7

1. THE CONTRADICTION IN NIETZSCHE’S PHILOSOPHY OF MEN AND WOMEN By drawing attention to Nietzsche’s deconstruction of any essentialist conception of gender that is derived from biological sexual difference‚ French interpreters like Derrida and Sarah Kofman (re)appropriated Nietzsche’s philosophy for feminists.8 As a consequence of such interpretations the blatant contradiction that permeates all of Nietzsche’s philosophy of women became more visible. On the one hand‚ his philosophy of women contains ideas about the specific innate nature of women. Obviously‚ contemporary philosophies of gender discard this part of Nietzsche’s ideas because they stand in the tradition of classical‚ essentialist theories of sexual difference that go back to Aristotle’s theory of the anatomical difference of the sexes. Biological difference has been considered the basis for the socio-political‚ the cognitive‚ and the moral differences of the sexes‚ which have been used throughout the ages to legitimize the hierarchical division of gender roles in society.9 The Aristotelian heritage not only shaped the dogmas of sexual difference in the middle ages‚ but it has continued to live in more or less modified versions in recent philosophical theories of gender difference. In these theories the biological and socio-cultural attributes of men and women are determined on the basis of a dualistic ontology‚ the gender-opposition we originally find in Aristotle’s work. The reemergence of these classic notions of gender difference can be seen in the philosophies of Rousseau‚ Kant‚ Hegel‚ and Schopenhauer‚ just to name a few. Accusations of misogyny in Nietzsche’s work are based on his affiliation with such essentialist theories. He freely admits his essentialist affiliations when he describes himself as the author of a “psychology” of the “eternal womanly.”10

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Standing in direct opposition to this psychology of the eternal womanly‚ Nietzsche’s anti-essentialist theory of gender is based on his constructivist idea of human nature. Man is the “noch nicht festgestellte Thier”11‚ which means that man is a creature that has not been finally determined. Man is still in the process of making‚ there is no essence or telos in the Aristotelian sense that men or women should aim at realizing for themselves. Nietzsche is well known for his “philosophy of contradictions”‚ as Karl Jaspers has described it‚ so the paradoxes in his philosophy of women do not come as a surprise.12 In effect‚ Nietzsche offers both a philosophy of sex and of gender that contradict each other. Nietzsche’s philosophy of sexual and gender difference and his critique of traditional metaphysics are intertwined. Hence the paradoxical character of his philosophy of women also has a bearing on his idea of metaphysics. An examination of the paradoxes is the goal of the following interpretation of the philosophy of women to be found in Nietzsche’s late philosophy. I will show how his critique of essentialist dualities of sexual difference serves him as a point of departure for his destruction of traditional‚ metaphysical conceptions of truth.13 Beliefs about the binary opposition of sexual difference is‚ according to Nietzsche‚ the basis of traditional metaphysical dualities‚ such as truth and falsity‚ mind and body‚ reason and emotions. His critique is directed at the development of Western philosophy out of Platonic‚ dualistic metaphysics. Derrida‚ in his interpretation of the Nietzschean philosophy of women‚ develops its critique of metaphysical conceptions of truth further with his own notion of the “non-truth of truth.”14 I will look at how Derrida‚ in the context of his deconstruction of metaphysical ideals of truth from Plato to Heidegger‚ implements Nietzsche’s constructivist theory of gender difference. I will conclude with some remarks on what can be termed as Nietzsche’s “feminized metaphysics”. This is a characterization of his late Dionysian conception of life‚ which is a post-metaphysical doctrine of the basic principles of life. It can be termed a “feminized metaphysics” because Nietzsche’s Dionysian conception of life is represented by the metaphor of life as a woman. As a feminized metaphysics it is furthermore an “immanent metaphysics” for it rejects all transcendent metaphysical foundations. Finally‚ I will show how the refutation of dualistic metaphysics leads to a pluralistic notion of life as a Dionysian phenomenon. As an outspoken critic of the feminists of his times‚ Nietzsche would obviously not have liked the phrase “feminization of metaphysics”. Kelly Oliver is right in maintaining that such a feminization merely entails that Nietzsche adds certain elements that have traditionally been ascribed to women to his conception of the Dionysian. The body‚ the emotions‚ the subconscious‚ all have to be a part of the Dionysian in order for it to be a full and encompassing conception of life.15 With this conception he aims at

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undermining dualistic metaphysical schemes that have determined our philosophical understanding of life. His endeavor thus belongs in a movement that has been termed as the “overcoming of metaphysics” (“Überwindung der Metaphysik”)‚ that is‚ the foundationalist metaphysics that stand in the Platonic tradition.16 Through his interpretation of Nietzsche’s philosophy of women Derrida also situates his own philosophy within this movement.17 In the following‚ I will compare Nietzsche’s and Derrida’s attempts at overcoming metaphysics. My main goal is to figure out Nietzsche’s stand on the question of metaphysics with reference to the question of gender and sexual difference. Derrida’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s philosophy of women is used to shed light on metaphysical dualities in terms of gender. Nietzsche’s and Derrida’s undermining‚ or deconstruction‚ of metaphysical conceptions of truth provokes the question of whether their critique of truth leads to an irrationalist position. In the late 1980’s‚ Jürgen Habermas forcefully articulated this criticism of their positions in the context of debates about postmodernism in philosophy.18 For Habermas‚ Nietzsche is the father of postmodern philosophy‚ and Derrida‚ one of the most prominent proponents of this philosophical stand in contemporary philosophy. Habermas criticizes this style of postmodernism in philosophy‚ because he argues that it undermines the standards of rationality in an enlightened modernity. Habermas is right in pointing out that Nietzsche’s critique of metaphysical conceptions of truth lays the basis for the postmodern critique of universalistic conceptions of truth. But does Nietzsche’s destruction of essentialist notions of gender dualities‚ as a vehicle for his critique of truth‚ necessarily lead to irrationalism‚ as Habermas claims? I argue that Habermas’ view of Nietzsche’s philosophy in this regard is onesided. Nietzsche’s philosophy of woman and of truth‚ is characterized by a tension between a destruction of philosophical notions of universal truths on the one hand‚ and on the other hand‚ a philosophical disposition in the tradition of Enlightenment‚ that is driven by a will to seek and find truth. I maintain that this tension between the rationalist and the irrationalist Nietzsche becomes especially explicit in his philosophy of women. Furthermore it is reflected in Nietzsche’s gender inflected conception of metaphysical truths.

2. THE METAPHYSICS OF THE DIFFERENCE OF THE SEXES Before examining Nietzsche’s use of images of women in his critique of truth let us take a look at the various images or metaphors of women in his writings from his later philosophical work.


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As already noted‚ Nietzsche draws upon traditional dualistic ideas about gender-difference in his essentialist description of the sexes. What is interesting‚ however‚ about his use of these gender cliches is that in his descriptions of the essence of the sexes men often look just as bad or silly as women do. Men‚ at times‚ appear as less complete beings than women‚ who are much more clever and sly. Women‚ whose sole determination is to bear children‚ often appear only as assistants to men’s endeavors. In addition to this‚ Nietzsche portrays a glorified view of men and women. Men are warriors and women have a skeptical outlook on life that shows a profound sense of reality. Nietzsche uses these exaltations of men and women polemically or for heuristic reasons. One could say that Nietzsche’s essentialist images of the sexes are constructed stereotypes. One thus senses a strong ironic undertone when Nietzsche claims that he is the author of a psychology of the “eternal womanly”. He adds that his doctrines are merely “his truths” which means that they are his interpretations.19 The ontology of sexual difference is always undermined by Nietzsche’s central idea of knowledge as interpretation. Characterizations of sexual difference do not describe facts‚ but are merely interpretations. That is why Nietzsche’s pragmatic theory of knowledge has been termed as “perspectivism”. The basic undermining of essentialism does not‚ however‚ do away with Nietzsche’s general anti-feminist outlook‚ as many of his negative statements about suffragettes and feminists show. Nietzsche was not sensitive to women’s struggle for equal rights just as he had no sympathy for the struggle of workers for better pay and better working conditions. As a spokesman for hierarchical social structures‚ he feared that political movements that call for equal rights would result in a demagogical massculture. In this sense‚ Nietzsche was anti-egalitarian‚ but we also have to bear in mind that he was less of a political analyst or theorist than a philosopher who diagnosed the human condition in the face of nihilism. Therefore‚ one also comes to see that he was less interested in the fight of feminists for equal rights than in describing their state of mind or what he perceived as their mentality. His main argument against the feminists of his time is that they are trying in vain to become like men. That is certainly no original insight for a misogynist at the end of the 19th century. The trivial anti-feminist statements yield more when they are looked at within the context of Nietzsche’s critique of truth and rationality. Feminists‚ Nietzsche states‚ are copying the very features of rationality that are making European men weak. The type of gender-equality that the feminists of his time were striving for contains a rejection of feminine attributes. Nietzsche considers these attributes elementary for the recovery of rationality‚ which he thinks has become sterile due to the repression of feminine elements. Nietzsche’s criticism of this type of rationality‚ that developed within Western philosophy since the days of Plato‚ takes as its

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point of departure a stereotypical image of a gender difference. Woman symbolizes bodily and emotive elements‚ and man symbolizes purely rational thinking. Nietzsche aims at developing an ideal of a healthier and fuller rationality composed of masculine and feminine elements. He wants the “minor reason” of the mind to become the “great reason” of the body.20 The Dionysian philosopher of the future is to become the man of such “great reason”; his rationality is both masculine and feminine. With this vitalistic ideal of an encompassing philosophical rationality Nietzsche is proposing a synthesis of art and philosophy‚ of sensuality on the one hand and rational‚ logical analysis on the other. (Art is here understood in the broad sense of the creative and innovative powers of human beings‚ and not in the narrow sense of creating fine art.) We therefore see that the tension between rationality on the one hand and aestheticism on the other (which Habermas equates with irrationalism)‚ is to be located in the person of the Dionysian artistic-philosopher. This type embodies a synthesis of elements that Nietzsche characterizes as both feminine and masculine. Nietzsche wants to supplement philosophical thinking with artistic elements because he believes that he has seen the limits of the philosophical will to seek and find truth. In the last phase of his philosophizing he comes to the conclusion that the philosophical “will to truth” (“Wille zur Wahrheit”)‚ which is for him the main motivation for philosophizing‚ is nihilistic because one cannot find truth. In the opening passages of the preface to Beyond Good and Evil‚ Nietzsche mocks the philosophers who have been driven by the search for truth. He figures truth as a woman who does not let her self be captured by clumsy philosophers trying to get a hold of her. He believes the will to truth is driven by a Platonic yearning for the foundation of truth. This longing is nihilistic in his view‚ because there can be no ultimate ground of truth such as‚ for example‚ the Platonic ideas are meant to be. The work of the philosopher is‚ therefore‚ to create‚ rather than to find‚ ultimate truths. That is the reason for his conclusion that “art is worth more than truth.”21 Now let us turn to Derrida. In his interpretation of woman as “non-truth of truth” Derrida does not explicitly mention one significant woman in Nietzsche’s philosophy. In the preface to the second edition of The Gay Science (which was written the same year Beyond Good and Evil was published) a figure from ancient Greek mythology by the name of Baubo is introduced.22 In my interpretation Baubo represents both Nietzsche’s Dionysian conception of life (which I earlier termed as his postmetaphysical concept of life) and‚ also‚ his dissolution of a dualistic model of truth. Perhaps Derrida sidesteps Baubo in his interpretation because Nietzsche’s description of her seems to entail allusions to a fundamentalist sense of truth. Baubo is a principle of life or being as a whole. That does not fit with Derrida’s understanding of Nietzsche’s philosophy as void of


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any center and lacking an encompassing principle of life. With Baubo‚ Nietzsche’s metaphysics seem to become utterly paradoxical. So let us take a closer look at what kind of metaphysical “truth” Baubo represents.

3. NATURALIZED METAPHYSICS: BAUBO AND THE DIONYSIAN Let us begin with the anti-foundationalist version of truth that Baubo represents. It employs a variation of the figure of woman as a truth that does not let herself be captured: “Perhaps truth is a woman who has reasons for not letting us see her reasons? Perhaps her name is—to speak Greek—Baubo?”23. Let us now go to the picture of Baubo as the female representation of Nietzsche’s conception of the Dionysian‚ the central conception in Nietzsche’s philosophy. The Dionysian embodies his major theories; the eternal recurrence‚ and the will to power‚ the eternal circularity of becoming and degenerating‚ the cycle of life‚ birth and death.24 (The Dionysian is thus the principle of life—this is after all “Lebensphilosophie”‚ philosophy of life.) For Nietzsche‚ the Dionysian is moreover the principle for the “intelligible character” of the world. 25 In order to underline the hypothetical character of it‚ he usually speaks of it in the conditional‚ for example‚ “what if the world were will to power and nothing else but that.”26 Despite the fact that these are his truths he nevertheless makes use of traditional metaphysical concepts. He claims‚ for example‚ that we have to give life as becoming the name or the “character of being”.27 In addition to that‚ he makes an effort to prove his Dionysian hypothesis by securing a foundation for it in theories of natural science. In recent Nietzsche scholarship‚ much progress has been made in tracing the background for the development of the main doctrines of his philosophy by examining his study of various theories within the natural sciences.28 The scientific “evidence” he found for his main doctrines can however only have the status of hypothetical affirmations. Truths and knowledge are interpretations in the service of life. Nietzsche’s main doctrines have‚ thus‚ to be understood as metaphysical reflections that deal with the eternal questions of being‚ becoming‚ causality‚ thought‚ freedom of the will‚ body‚ soul and so forth. Sally Haslanger has defined such reflections as an “aporematic approach” to metaphysics. This approach yields a non-foundational‚ post-metaphysical metaphysics. The term “aporematic” emphasizes the notion of a riddle or a puzzle. Writes Haslanger: On this view metaphysics is not‚ at least in the traditional philosophical sense‚ a foundational project at all: it is not a quest for self-evident premises on which one can build

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the edifice of knowledge. Aporematic metaphysics might reasonably be considered immanent metaphysics: the questions‚ the puzzles‚ and the proposed answers arise within our thinking in response to current theoretical and practical demands.29

Theoretical and practical demands of this kind are‚ according to Nietzsche‚ derived from a very basic human need. He fully agrees with Schopenhauer’s idea of the “metaphysical need” that we have as human beings.30 The philosopher is driven by this need and therefore loves such aporematic questions in the same way he loves life. Philosophy is philia/love and it is “the love for a woman that causes doubts in us.”31 The story of the figure Baubo reveals this type of “immanent metaphysics”. As a theory of the basic principles of life this kind of metaphysics is moreover secular for it is supposed to counteract any teleological or eschatological contents in traditional metaphysics.32 Baubo is yet another manifestation of how Nietzsche mines ancient Greek mythology in his attempt to undermine the Platonic-Christian dualistic metaphysical tradition. By going back to the cultural heritage that precedes this tradition‚ he believes that he retrieves a sense of life that got lost in the transition from a mythical to a rational‚ philosophical worldview in ancient Greece. We encounter Baubo in the Homeric Hymns as a marginal figure in the story of Demeter‚ mother Earth. Demeter has lost her will to live and grieves over the vanishing of Persephone‚ her beloved daughter‚ into the realm of the dead. Baubo‚ a maid‚ cheers her with a variety of bawdy jokes. Baubo‚ whose name means vulva‚ shows Demeter that her daughter will be reborn. She does this by lifting her skirt‚ and‚ through the opening of her vulva‚ showing the head of the baby Dionysos. Baubo laughs when displaying this and so does Demeter who is consoled by this promise of the return/rebirth of her daughter. With this performance Baubo illustrates the fate of Persephone who is the symbol of the circularity of natural processes. Persephone comes in the spring and goes to the realm of the dead in the winter. Baubo shows‚ and manages to convince‚ Demeter that her daughter is due to return to the realm of the living. Baubo unveils herself when she exposes herself to Demeter. Nietzsche says‚ however—and this is of major importance—that the unveiling does not display some kind of metaphysical truth in the foundationalist sense. He writes: “We do not believe that truth appears through unveiling.”33 So even though Baubo’s unveiling presents the Dionysian “truth” about life as the eternal circularity of becoming and degenerating‚ there cannot be any ultimate ground to such a truth. It is‚ as Nietzsche repeatedly says‚ merely my own truth‚ my own interpretation of the basic principles of life. Baubo’s act represents not only Dionysian metaphysics‚ it is an artistic performance of these metaphysics. As such Baubo’s act is a metaphor for the necessity of artistic creativity as a life enhancing component of


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philosophical thinking. Dionysian artistic-philosophy should‚ in Nietzsche’s view‚ offer perspectives on one’s self and one’s life in the same way Baubo offers the suffering Demeter a consoling‚ namely an affirmative‚ perspective on life. This is truth in art‚ leading Nietzsche to the postulation that the truthfulness of truth is to be measured in accordance with that which strengthens the will to life or the will to power. Obviously‚ such a position precludes the possibility of any universal truth or standards‚ other than pragmatic and life affirmative ones‚ for measuring truth claims. Nevertheless‚ Nietzsche gives the representation of the Dionysian in Baubo’s act the status of a “last truth”‚ that is as close as one can get to truth. This status seems contradicted by other remarks about her act as Nietzsche describes it. If her representation is something like a last truth‚ how can she have “reasons for not letting us see her reasons”? How can Baubo uncover and yet not let us see her reasons? This apparent contradiction can be explained in the following manner: With Baubo‚ Nietzsche aims precisely at dissolving dichotomies between uncovering and covering‚ or being and appearance. Baubo’s uncovering therefore does not present a fundamental‚ naked truth. Her nakedness is also a veil‚ as the ambivalence of the meaning of the German noun “scham” reveals. For it implies showing the naked truth and hiding it at the same time.34

4. OVERCOMING METAPHYSICS: NIETZSCHE‚ DERRIDA AND HEIDEGGER The ambiguity of veiling and unveiling is also the focal point of Derrida’s interpretation. He writes in “The Question of Style”: “Truth would ... be but a surface‚ would not become profound truth‚ raw‚ desirable except through the effect of a veil: that befalls her.”35 With his notion of “woman” as the “non-truth of truth” Derrida takes Nietzsche’s conception of truth a step further. The goal of his interpretation is to show that Nietzsche’s philosophy is characterized by a heterogeneity. It is a philosophy that is utterly devoid of a center‚ or any sort of grounding that could serve as an Archimedean point of departure for its main doctrines.36 This interpretation seems challenged by the Dionysian‚ as represented by Baubo. If the Dionysian is a central conception of this philosophy‚ Nietzsche has not (contrary to his intention) managed to overcome the metaphysical tradition. That is precisely what Heidegger maintains in his famous reading of Nietzsche’s philosophy.37 The goal of Derrida’s interpretation is to refute Heidegger’s understanding of Nietzschean metaphysics according to which the Dionysian conception of life is merely an overturn of the dualistic metaphysics of Platonic philosophy. Heidegger argues that in his attempt to reject the Platonic condemnation of the body‚ appearance and illusion‚ Nietzsche reinstates these as a new metaphysical grounding of his

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philosophy. Nietzsche is supposed to have traded appearance for being‚ falsity for truth‚ body for mind. These earthly features become‚ according to Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche‚ a new foundation for a naturalized metaphysics. Derrida is quite right in rejecting the Heideggerian interpretation of Nietzsche as the “last metaphysical thinker” who stays within the tradition of metaphysics‚ originating in Plato‚ but also brings it to an end. The overarching goal of Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche is to prove how he‚ Heidegger‚ manages to transcend the tradition of metaphysical dualism‚ with his philosophy of being. Heidegger overlooks Nietzsche’s use of the Dionysian model of Baubo as an illustration of the dissolution of dualistic schemes. By eliminating the world of being‚ we also get rid of the world of appearance‚ as Nietzsche says.38 Baubo’s act conveys the impossibility of foundational principles of truth. The Dionysian principle of being‚ represented by Baubo‚ the eternal recurrence of the processes of the will to power‚ renders a pluralistic ontology.39 Nietzsche’s dissolution of dualistic metaphysics goes hand in hand with his undermining of gender duality and does necessarily lead to a pluralistic theory of gender. Nietzsche did not elaborate such a theory‚ but he worked out the preconditions for it. The first step is the rehabilitation of the side of the duality that has traditionally been associated with the female (namely the body‚ the affections and appearance). If Nietzsche were only reversing the duality‚ as Heidegger claims‚ he would merely substitute the attributes associated with the male (mind‚ rationality‚ truth) with the female attributes. Nietzsche’s goal is broader. For he wants to synthesize those female and male elements which were traditionally opposed to one another. The Dionysian philosopher of the future is supposed to incorporate this ideal. Derrida places the dissolution of the binary opposition of gender in Nietzsche’s theory in a contemporary context. He thus makes explicit what is implicit by showing how the abandoning of a dualistic structure gives way to a plurality of gendered attributes. When Derrida maintains that the overcoming of the bipolarity of gender opens the way to plurality‚ his argument has direct consequences for feminist theories of gender difference. As Jane Gallop has shown in her work on Derrida’s relevance for feminist theories of the 1970s‚ his interpretation entails a critique of theories of gender difference that delineate women as a unitary subject with unitary‚ singular attributes and needs.40 Such generalizations about women’s innate attributes are‚ for example‚ present in certain strands of feminist ethics that assume a unitary feminine moral perspective. Theories of this kind are socially essentialist for they imply that all women have a specific social nature in common. Needless to say‚ generalizing about women’s social nature was partly politically motivated‚ for example in order to emphasize the ethical and political importance of notions like care and context sensitivity. The politically instrumental nature of such


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descriptions of women is not‚ however‚ what is at stake here. Derrida is basically concerned with the ontological assumptions about women and gender difference that are at the basis of theoretical descriptions of women as a unitary subject. Butler‚ with her more radical deconstruction of sex and gender‚ extends Derrida’s critique of categories of “women”‚ or the “subject” of feminism. As a consequence of this deconstructive analysis theories of gender have given increased weight to the plurality and diversity of gender.41 But let us again return to how the question of whether to read Nietzsche’s metaphysics as a mere “overturning of Platonism” as Heidegger has so forcefully argued.42 My claim is that it is precisely Nietzsche’s dissolution of gender oppositions that prevents the definition of his philosophy as foundationalist in the manner Heidegger proposes. I maintain that Heidegger’s philosophy of being is much more aligned with the metaphysical tradition than Nietzsche’s philosophy. Derrida can again be of some help‚ because he interprets the basic concept of Heideggerian philosophy‚ the fundamental-ontological concept of being‚ with reference to the metaphor of the woman. He argues that being must‚ as illustrated by the metaphor of the woman‚ be understood as diverse and not as unitary. In his book Identity and Difference Heidegger was indeed striving against the traditional (Platonic) metaphysical drive to define being as the “one” and the “identical”.43 Heidegger claims that the metaphysical tradition he criticizes can be characterized as the “metaphysics of presence”. The philosophers wanted to grasp and‚ thus‚ get hold of being by viewing it as something that can be conceptualized‚ categorized and made present like an object.. Heidegger is on par with Nietzsche in trying to resist the metaphysical drive to grasp the fundamental truths‚ and his overarching goal is to resist defining “being” in a way that makes it “present” or “graspable”. Despite this I argue that Heidegger remains much more tied to the traditional metaphysical way of thinking than Nietzsche does for the following reason: In all his philosophizing Heidegger is lead by metaphysical questioning about the meaning of being (“Sinn des Seins”). Therefore “being” is‚ in his philosophy‚ an ultimate reference for meaning and truth even though being escapes our reach and can not be grasped and made explicit. Nietzsche and Derrida‚ on the other hand‚ resist the metaphysical temptation because they do not postulate life‚ symbolized by Baubo or the “woman”‚ as the absolute reference for truth and meaning. The Dionysian conception of life‚ as represented by Baubo‚ expresses plurality and difference without ultimate grounding for the meaning of life and for truth.

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5. DIONYSIAN METAPHYSICS OF LIFE AND DEATH The Dionysian principle of life as a “non-truth of truth” makes apparent the contradictory character of Nietzsche’s picture of the philosopher of the future. On the one hand‚ the philosopher is supposed to continue searching for truth‚ and is therefore driven by the will to truth. On the other hand‚ Nietzsche postulates that the philosophy of the future should be artistic and that the philosophers will be like artists who create “truths”. This portrayal leaves us with a tension between art and philosophy that becomes most apparent in his last works‚ emerging as well as a conspicuous element in Nietzsche’s writing. We see a coexistence of literary style with analytic and scientific style. Nietzsche makes extensive use of scientific findings to prove his own theories‚ which he also tries to back up by argumentation in a pure philosophical manner. Due to its scientific content‚ he claims that his late theory of the philosopher-artist is a “physiology of art”. Physiology was considered a fundamental scientific discipline in the last decades of the 19th century.44 The main topic of the physiology of art is the “psychology of the artist” or Nietzsche’s thoughts on artistic creativity.45 He says that the philosopher cannot merely rely on rational thinking‚ but as an artist must open himself to sensual experiences. To complete the sensual aspect in the picture of the artist-philosopher he revives his conception of Dionysian ecstasy laid out in his early work The Birth of Tragedy. The philosopher is supposed to embody both reason and the “other of reason”‚ as Habermas has termed the sensual‚ ecstatic aspects of Nietzsche’s prescriptive theory of Dionysian philosophy.46 This construction creates an unresolved tension‚ and Nietzsche fluctuates in his attitude. Towards the end of his philosophizing he puts more weight on art. The result is that he overestimates the potential of art. Habermas claims that he falls prey to aesthetic irrationalism on grounds of the increased weight he gives the ecstatic aspects of the Dionysian in his late philosophy. As I have shown‚ this critique is onesided for it restricts itself to the artistic side of Nietzsche’s philosophy‚ and does not take into account the more rationalistic side of it.47 Nietzsche aimed at a synthesis of attributes traditionally associated with men and women. He paved a way for a critique of one-sided rationality that does not acknowledge the cognitive content of affective and sensual experiences. He is‚ therefore‚ a precursor of 20th century theories that recognize rationality in emotions and emotions in rationality. Nietzsche “feminized” both rationality and metaphysics. He wanted to expand the conception of rationality‚ and he wanted a metaphysics that is not restricted to the “meta”- level or merely the transcendent dimension‚ but also included the level of the “physical” which means for him the body and the earth.48 The body‚ in turn‚ is a medium for experiences through which one can gain a metaphysical insight. Our awareness of bodily rhythms‚ for


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example‚ gives us a sense that we are part of nature with its eternal circularity of organic processes. Our perception of how the body ages and degenerates gives us a sense of the finiteness of human existence. It makes us aware of time as progression and as the major force in human existence. These facts about what it means to be a finite being are for Nietzsche “last truths” about life. Nietzsche was also fascinated by the wonders of conception and‚ especially‚ of giving birth. He conceived giving birth as the Dionysian activity par excellence insofar as it combines both the greatest extremes in life‚ excruciating physical pain and ecstatic joy —at least in his view of it. He did not claim that women are closer to life and to nature‚ and have a more profound metaphysical sense due to their possibility of experiencing birth. He was not interested in “real” birth. Birth was for him primarily a metaphor for a hightened sense of the intensity of life as a dialectic of pleasure and pain. He thus elevated the notion of birth to the level of artistic creativity. This sublimation of birth can be described as a “male appropriation of female procreativity.”49 Philosophizing in an artistic manner consequently means creating something as if it were giving birth to a child. As a metaphor for creativity‚ birth is a symbol for the workings of the artistic‚ Dionysian philosopher who is able to undertake a “reevaluation of values” and to create something new. In that sense‚ Nietzsche shares Hannah Arendt’s idea that natality is as important a factor for a philosophical understanding of human existence as mortality.50 Nietzsche does not draw any ethical conclusions from this. Birth is for him primarily a symbol of creativity. He does not take into account other‚ equally important‚ and ethically more relevant aspects of birth‚ like care and nurturing.51 Understanding life as a Dionysian circularity of life and death serves‚ for him‚ as an existential challenge for living life in a creative manner‚ as a means of actualizing one’s creative potential. Creativity is for him primarily the means of freeing ourselves from values and ideals in our culture that inhibit personal growth. Inhibiting moral ideals have‚ in his view‚ their foundation in a metaphysical understanding of life that denies the body‚ the affections‚ and earthly life’s true value. But although Nietzsche feminized metaphysics one can by no means conclude that Nietzsche was a friend of women‚ as he describes himself at one point in a sort of whimsical‚ ironic manner.52 He can‚ however‚ certainly be described as a friend of the womanly‚ meaning the attributes that have been associated with women in our tradition. Nietzsche integrated them into his ideal of a Dionysian‚ philosophical way of thinking. By doing so he took the attributes that have traditionally been linked to women and men out of their gender specific confinement. He moved from an opposition of ‘male’ and ‘female’ elements towards their integration. It is an historic irony that such an infamous misogynist as Nietzsche can be described as a feminist‚ anti-feminist philosopher because of his recognition of some of the positive attributes of the traditionally ‘feminine’ traits and qualities.

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NOTES 1

Parts of this paper are taken from an earlier paper‚ “Die Kritik essentialistischer Bilder der Frauen in Nietzsche’s Spätphilosophie und ihre Bedeutung für philosophische Theorien der Geschlechterdifferenz‚” in Nietzscheforschung 5/6 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag‚ 2000)‚ 487500. I would like to thank Lydia Voronina‚ Janet Borgerson and Charlotte Witt for helpful comments and suggestions. 2 Friedrich Nietzsche‚ Jenseits von Gut und Böse‚ §§ 232-239‚ in Sämtliche Werke‚ Kritische Studienausgabe (15 volumes) (hereafter KSA and number of vol.)‚ (Berlin/New York: de Gruyter‚ 1980)‚ KSA 5‚ 170-178. 3 Arthur Schopenhauer‚ “Über die Weiber‚” in Parerga und Paralipomena II/I‚ Zürcher Ausgabe der Werke‚ (Zürich: Diogenes‚ 1977)‚ 667-681. 4 Carol Diethe‚ “Nietzsche and the Feminists‚” in Nietzsche’s Women: Beyond the Whip (Berlin/New York: de Gruyter)‚ 1996‚ 137-165; see also Teresa Wobbe‚ Gleichheit und Differenz. Politische Strategien von Frauenrechtlerinnen um die Jahrhundertwende (Frankfurt M: Campus)‚ 1989. 5 See for example the collection of essays edited by Kelly Oliver and Marilyn Pearsall‚ Feminist Interpretations of Friedrich Nietzsche (University Park‚ Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press)‚ 1998. 6 Jacques Derrida‚ “The Question of Style‚” in Feminist Interpretations of Friedrich Nietzsche‚ 50-65. See also Ellen K. Feder‚ Mary C. Rawlinson and Emily Zakin (eds.)‚ Derrida and Feminism: Recasting the Question of Woman (London/New York: Routledge‚ 1997)‚ 2. 7 Judith Butler‚ Gender Trouble (New York/London‚ Routledge‚ 1990). 8 Sarah Kofman‚ “Baubo: Theological Perversion and Fetishism‚” in Feminist Interpretations of Friedrich Nietzsche‚ 21-49. 9 See Susan Moller Okin‚ “Aristotle: Woman’s Place and Nature in a Functionalist World‚” in her book Women in Western Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press‚ 1979)‚ 73-96. 10 Friedrich Nietzsche‚ Ecce Homo‚ “Warum ich so gute Bücher schreibe‚” § 5‚ KSA 6‚ 305. 11 Friedrich Nietzsche‚ Jenseits von Gut und Böse‚ § 62‚ KSA 5‚ 81. 12 Karl Jaspers‚ Nietzsche (Berlin/New York: de Gruyter‚ 1981 (1936)). 13 As for his critique of metaphysical conceptions of truth and objectivity one could say that Nietzsche undertakes a pre-feminist critique (albeit without any feminist intentions) for it is preemptive of much of later feminist critique of these same conceptions. See for example Lorraine Code‚ What Can She Know? Feminist Theory and the Construction of Knowledge (Ithaca: Cornell University Press‚ 1991). 14 Derrida‚ “The Question of Style”‚ 53. 15 Kelly Oliver‚ Womanizing Nietzsche (London/New York: Routledge‚ 1995)‚ ix-xvii. 16 Nietzsche would have agreed with A.N. Whitehead’s broad characterization of European philosophy as “footnotes to Plato” for he views the Platonic philosophy as the groundwork for most subsequent European philosophy. His critique of Platonic metaphysics is thus directed at metaphysics from ancient Greek philosophy to 19th century German idealism. 17 The characterization of this movement as an overcoming of metaphysics comes from Heidegger. He tried to show the limits of the kind of metaphysics initiated by Platonic philosophy. Heidegger’s intention was not to discard metaphysics‚ but to transform it with his philosophy of being. See Martin Heidegger‚ “Unterwegs zur Sprache”‚ Vorträge und Aufsätze (Pfullingen: Neske‚ 1959)‚ 109. 18 Jürgen Habermas‚ Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne (Frankfurt M.: Suhrkamp‚ 1986). 19 Friedrich Nietzsche‚ Jenseits von Gut und Böse‚ § 22‚ KSA 5‚ 37.

NIETZSCHE’S FEMINIZATION OF METAPHYSICS 20

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Friedrich Nietzsche‚ Also sprach Zarathustra‚ “Von den Verächtern des Leibes”‚ KSA 4‚ 39. 21 Friedrich Nietzsche‚ Posthumous writings‚ KSA 13‚ 522. 22 Kofman on the other hand gives Baubo a central role in her interpretation. Baubo represents for Kofman the undermining of the fetish-character of truth that Nietzsche attacks. In that sense Kofman analyzes Nietzsche’s critique of foundationalist conceptions of truth with reference to a psychoanalytic model of truth and illusion to be found in Freud’s description of the fetishist. See Sigmund Freud‚ “Fethisismus‚” in Freud-Studienausgabe‚ vol. III (Frankfurt M.: Fischer‚ 1972)‚ 9-22. 23 Friedrich Nietzsche‚ Die fröhliche Wissenschaft‚ Preface‚ § 4‚ KSA 3‚ 352. 24 Apart from the fact that Nietzsche speaks of his leading doctrine in metaphysical terms‚ he stresses that the idea of the eternal circulation of the will processes is also an ideal. The eternal recurrence is an “existential imperative”‚ a thought that serves as a regulative ideal in order to accept‚ get over and learn to live with the fact‚ that life as such has no inherent meaning. It is an ideal that should help overcome nihilism. That opens up new possibilities‚ and this imperative therefore most importantly calls for a creative affirmation of life. See Bernd Magnus‚ Nietzsche’s Existential Imperative (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press‚ 1978). 25 Friedrich Nietzsche‚ Jenseits von Gut und Böse‚ § 36‚ KSA 5‚ 55. 26 Ibid.‚ 55. 27 “Dem Werden den Charakter des Seins aufzuprägen — das ist der höchste Wille zur Macht.” Posthumous writings‚ KSA 12‚ 312. For more discussion about Nietzsche’s metaphysics see Sigridur Thorgeirsdottir‚ “Metaphysik‚”‚ in Nietzsche Handbuch‚ ed. Henning Ottmann (Stuttgart: Metzler‚ 2000)‚ 281-283. 28 Wolfgang Müller-Lauter‚ Nietzsches Philosophie der Gegensätze und die Gegensätze seiner Philosophie (Berlin/New York: de Gruyter‚ 1978); Günter Abel‚ Die Dynamik der Willen zur Macht und die ewige Wiederkehr des Gleichen (Berlin/New York: de Gruyter 1984)‚ (esp. 187-246); Marco Brusotti‚ Die Leidenschaft der Erkenntnis (Berlin/New York: de Gruyter‚ 1996). 29 Sally Haslanger‚ “Feminism in Metaphysics: Negotiating the Natural‚” in The Cambridge Companion to Feminism‚ eds. Miranda Fricker and Jennifer Hornsby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press‚ 1999‚) 114. 30 Arthur Schopenhauer‚ “Über das metaphysische Bedürfniß des Menschen” in Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung‚ II/I‚ Zürcher Ausgabe der Werke (Zürich: Diogenes‚ 1977)‚ 186-219. 31 Friedrich Nietzsche‚ Die fröhliche Wissenschaft‚ Preface‚ § 3. KSA 3‚ 350. 32 See Karl Löwith’s classic discussion of such tendencies in the tradition of metaphysics‚ Weltgeschichte als Heilsgeschehen (Stuttgart: Metzler‚ 1953). 33 “Wir glauben nicht mehr daran‚ dass Wahrheit noch Wahrheit bleibt‚ wenn man ihr die Schleier abzieht.” Friedrich Nietzsche‚ Die fröhliche Wissenschaft‚ Preface‚ § 3‚ KSA 3‚ 352. 34 The existential aspect of the ability of art to modify “naked truth” must also be kept in mind. With his notion of how horrible naked truth can be and how art can transfigure horror into a helpful illusion. Nietzsche’s indebtness to philosophers in the romantic tradition like Schelling and Schopenhauer becomes visible. Nietzsche believes that the ancient Greeks were more capable of this than any other people. He closes his passage about Baubo with the following remarks: “Oh‚ those Greeks! They knew how to live: to do that you courageously have to stay at the surface‚ the wrinkle‚ the skin‚ to worship appearance‚ to believe in forms‚ tones‚ words‚ the whole Olymp of appearance! These Greeks were superficial — out of profundity.” Jacques Derrida‚ “The Question of Style”‚ 56.

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36

The question of in how far Derrida underestimates the centrality of the Dionysian principle in Nietzsche’s philosophy calls for a much lengthier discussion that cannot be undertaken here. 37 Martin Heidegger‚ Nietzsche (2 vol.) (Pfullingen: Neske‚ 1961)‚ see esp. vol. II‚ 7-29. 38 Friedrich Nietzsche‚ Götzendämmerung‚ “Wie die ‘wahre Welt’ endlich zur Fabel wurde‚” KSA 6‚ 81. 39 I can not go into explicating Nietzsche’s will theory as a pluralistic ontology‚ but instead refer to the work of W. Müller-Lauter and G. Abel in this direction. 40

Jane Gallop‚ “Women in Spurs and Nineties Feminism‚” in Derrida and Feminism‚ 7-20. Such theories have on the other hand some times been criticized for discarding politically‚ pragmatic generalizing notions about women that are necessary for feminist emancipatory struggle. 42 For an extended analysis of Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s philosophy see Wolfgang Müller-Lauter’s recent book Heidegger und Nietzsche (Berlin/New York: de Gruyter‚ 2000). 43 Martin Heidegger‚ Identität und Differenz (Pfullingen: Neske‚ 1957). 44 Nietzsche was well read in the physiology of his time. He drew upon the physiological theories of Claude Bernhard and Wilhelm Roux in his philosophy and physiology of the body. See Sigridur Thorgeirsdottir‚ Vis creativa. Kunst und Wahrheit in der Philosophie Friedrich Nietzsches (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann‚ 1996)‚ chapter 4. 45 Friedrich Nietzsche‚ Götzendämmerung‚ “Streifzüge eines Unzeitgemässen”‚ § 8‚ KSA 6‚ 116. 46 Jürgen Habermas‚ “Eintritt in die Postmoderne: Nietzsche als Drehscheibe‚” in Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne‚ 127. 47 Habermas’ critique also aims at Derrida who he accuses of extinguishing the distinction between literature and philosophy. It can not be the purpose of this paper to examine the Habermasian critique of Derrida which he undertakes in connection with the interpretation of Nietzsche. I consider my analysis of Nietzsche’s philosophy in light of the Habermasian critique to provide at least some basis for undertaking an analysis of the claims Habermas makes about irrationality in Derrida’s thought. Christopher Norris has done that in “Deconstruction‚ Postmodernism and Philosophy: Habermas on Derrida‚” in Praxis International 1989/8‚ 426-446. Norris raises a number of objections to Habermas’s reading of Derrida in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Norris argues that deconstruction cannot be understood as just another form of counter enlightenment thinking that completely annihiliates the distinction between philosophy and literature. In his view Habermas fails to see that Derrida is engaged with distinctively philosophical problems even while exploiting certain rhetorical or fictive devices which seem to undermine philosophy as argumentative thinking. The same could just as well be said about the literary sides of Nietzsche’s philosophy. 48 His descriptions of bodily experiences can be seen as a precursor to phenomenological descriptions of corporeality and embodiment‚ for example in the work of Simone de Beauvoir and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. See Sara Heinämaa‚ “What is a Woman? Butler and Beauvoir on the Foundations of the Sexual Difference‚” Hypatia 12/1‚ 1997. 49 Definition from Evelyn Fox-Keller‚ Secrets of Life. Secrets of Death (New York/London: Routledge‚ 1992)‚ 50.. 50 Hannah Arendt‚ The Human Condition‚ (especially chapter V‚ “Action”)‚ (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press‚ 1958). 51 On grounds of his negative view of Christian morality as an ethics of sympathy‚ Nietzsche is overly sceptical of such traits as caring and nurturing. He lacks appreciation for their positive moral worth. His ethics of personal growth are purely individualistic and do not take into account factors like caring for others and being cared for. 41

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Friedrich Nietzsche‚ Ecce Homo‚ “Warum ich so gute Bücher schreibe”‚ KSA 6‚ 305.

REFERENCES Abel‚ Günter. Die Dynamik der Willen zur Macht und die ewige Wiederkehr des Gleichen. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter‚ 1984. Arendt‚ Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press‚ 1958. Butler‚ Judith. Gender Trouble. New York/London: Routledge‚ 1990. Brusotti‚ Marco. Die Leidenschaft der Erkenntnis. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter‚ 1996. Code‚ Lorraine. What Can She Know? Feminist Theory and the Construction of Knowledge. Ithaca: Cornell University Press‚ 1991. Derrida‚ Jacques. “The Question of Style.” In Feminist Interpretations of Friedrich Nietzsche‚ edited by Kelly Oliver and Marilyn Pearsall‚ 50-65. University Park‚ Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press‚ 1998. Diethe‚ Carol. Nietzsche’s Women: Beyond the Whip‚ Berlin/New York: de Gruyter‚ 1996. Feder‚ Ellen K.‚ Mary C. Rawlinson and Emily Zakin‚ eds. Derrida and Feminism: Recasting the Question of Woman. London/New York: Routledge‚ 1997. Fox-Keller‚ Evelyn. Secrets of Life. Secrets of Death. New York/London: Routledge‚ 1992. Freud‚ Sigmund. ‚‚Fethisismus.” In Freud-Studienausgabe‚ vol. III‚ 9-22. Frankfurt M.: Fischer‚ 1972. Jane Gallop‚ “Women in Spurs and Nineties Feminism.” In Derrida and Feminism: Recasting the Question of Woman‚ edited by Ellen K. Feder‚ Mary C. Rawlinson‚ Emily Zakin‚ 7-20. London/New York: Routledge‚ 1997. Habermas‚ Jürgen. Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne. Frankfurt M.: Suhrkamp‚ 1986. Haslanger‚ Sally. “Feminism in Metaphysics: Negotiating the Natural.” In The Cambridge Companion to Feminism‚ edited by Miranda Fricker and Jennifer Hornsby‚ 107-126. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press‚ 1999. Heinämaa‚ Sara. “What is a Woman? Butler and Beauvoir on the Foundations of the Sexual Difference.“ Hypatia 12/1 (1997). Heidegger‚ Martin. Identität und Differenz. Pfullingen: Neske‚ 1957. Heidegger‚ Martin. Nietzsche (2 vol.). Pfullingen: Neske‚ 1961. Jaspers‚ Karl. Nietzsche‚ Berlin/New York: de Gruyter‚ 1981 (1936). Kofman‚ Sarah. “Baubo: Theological Perversion and Fetishism.” In Feminist Interpretations of Friedrich Nietzsche‚ edited by Kelly Oliver and Marilyn Pearsall‚ 21-49. University Park‚ Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press‚ 1998. Löwith‚ Karl. Weltgeschichte als Heilsgeschehen. Stuttgart: Metzler‚ 1953. Magnus‚ Bernd. Nietzsche’s Existencial Imperative. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press‚ 1978. Müller-Lauter‚ Wolfgang. Heidegger und Nietzsche. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter‚ 2000. Müller-Lauter‚ Wolfgang. Nietzsches Philosophie der Gegensätze und die Gegensätze seiner Philosophie. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter‚ 1978. Nietzsche‚ Friedrich. Sämtliche Werke‚ Kritische Studienausgabe (15 volumes). Berlin/New York: de Gruyter‚ 1980. Norris‚ Christopher. “Deconstruction‚ Postmodernism and Philosophy: Habermas on Derrida.” Praxis International 1989/8: 426-446. Okin‚ Susan Moller. Women in Western Political Thought. Princeton: Princeton University Press‚ 1979. Oliver‚ Kelly. Womanizing Nietzsche. London/New York: Routledge‚ 1995. Oliver‚ Kelly and Marilyn Pearsall‚ eds. Feminist Interpretations of Friedrich Nietzsche. University Park‚ Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press‚ 1998.

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Schopenhauer‚ Arthur. Die Welt ah Wille und Vorstellung. Zürcher Ausgabe der Werke. Zürich: Diogenes‚ 1977. Schopenhauer‚ Arthur. “Über die Weiber”. In Parerga und Paralipomena II/I. Zürcher Ausgabe der Werke. Zürich: Diogenes‚ 1977‚ 667-681. Thorgeirsdottir‚ Sigridur. “Metaphysik”. In Nietzsche Handbuch‚ edited by Henning Ottmann‚ 281-283. Stuttgart: Metzler‚ 2000. Thorgeirsdottir‚ Sigridur. Vis creativa. Kunst und Wahrheit in der Philosophie Friedrich Nietzsches. Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann‚ 1996. Wobbe‚ Teresa. Gleichheit und Differenz. Politische Strategien von Frauenrechtlerinnen um die Jahrhundertwende. Frankfurt M.: Campus‚ 1989.

PSYCHOLOGIZING CARTESIAN DOUBT FEMINIST READING STRATEGIES AND THE “UNTHOUGHT” OF PHILOSOPHY1

Martina Reuter (University of Helsinki‚ Finland)

Recently many feminist critics of the history of philosophy have attempted to analyze the “unthought” elements residing beneath the thoughts expressed on the surface of philosophical texts. By trying to capture unthought elements‚ feminist philosophers have tried to explicate gendered implications hidden in philosophical texts which are‚ on the surface‚ gender neutral. This feminist search for the “unthought” foundation of philosophy has used two main methodological strategies. One strategy has been based on textual analyses. Feminist philosophers as diverse as Luce Irigaray‚ Michèle le Doeuff and Genevieve Lloyd have studied how the imagery of a philosophical text contributes to its meaning and have attempted to illuminate how metaphorical and other imagery structures of philosophical texts contain gendered implications. Many of these readings are—more or less directly—inspired and empowered by the framework of deconstruction.2 One guideline for these approaches is the awareness that the meaning of a text cannot be reduced to what is said on its surface. Further‚ the meaning of a philosophical text must be recognized as produced by the text itself‚ which means that it cannot be traced back to any intentions outside the text. To the extent that the philosophical canon devaluates women or the feminine‚ it must be shown how this devaluation happens in specific canonical texts. The other main feminist strategy for uncovering the philosophical unthought has been guided by a search for psychocultural motives hidden in the texts. While the textual strategy focuses on meanings as they are expressed in the philosophical texts as such‚ the psychocultural reading strategy focuses on the motives which have guided the production of the 69 L. Alanen and C. Witt (eds.)‚ Feminist Reflections on the History of Philosophy‚ 69-100. © 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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texts. This implies an interest in cultural contexts as well as in individual philosophers and their possibly hidden psychological features. This strategy has favoured a framework of cultural psychoanalysis‚ where contextual and individual psychological features merge. The early modern French philosopher René Descartes has been a frequent target of critical feminist readings‚ textual as well as psychocultural. He is an intriguing figure in many ways: standing at the threshold of modern philosophy and turning the focus of philosophy onto the thinking subject. Describing the cogito‚ the thinking subject‚ Descartes uses a vocabulary which resembles the vocabulary of our contemporary psychology and thereby he seems to theorize about psychological issues and thus open the door for psychological criticism. From a feminist point of view‚ Descartes is especially complex‚ because he presented a completely egalitarian ideal of knowledge and the knower‚ at the same time as he contributed to a philosophical tradition which has excluded women. The main focus of my article is on the legitimacy of these psychocultural readings of Cartesian philosophy. I will study Susan Bordo’s interpretation of what she calls the “Cartesian masculinization of thought”3 and present a critical reading of her model of interpretation. My aim is to analyze the ability of a psychocultural framework to illuminate the unthought elements in Descartes’ philosophy. I will give close readings of some passages from Descartes’ corpus as well as discuss the philosophical foundation of psychocultural interpretations. Feminist discussions of philosophy in general and of Descartes in particular have been greatly influenced by Bordo’s critique of Cartesian philosophy.4 Her argument concerns several topics that have been central to feminist critiques of early modern philosophy‚ critiques which often focus on the developments in philosophy of science. The topics of general feminist interest covered by Bordo’s study are‚ first‚ a critique of the ideal of dispassion and detached objectivity‚ including a critique of mind-body dualism and detachment from one’s own senses as well as a critique of methodological detachment from the objects of knowledge. Further‚ Bordo’s reading of Descartes is related to a critique of the mathematical mechanization of nature and the “death of nature” that this mechanization is seen to imply‚ and‚ finally‚ Bordo develops the claim that the subject of science‚ or the still dominant position of knowledge born during this early modern period‚ is in some sense “masculine”. Bordo’s reading of Cartesian philosophy has occasionally been criticized by feminist philosophers. The critique has either entirely rejected the idea of “unthought” implications of philosophical texts and concepts‚ and thereby the idea of sexual bias built into philosophical theory‚5 or it has focused on details in Bordo’s argument‚ criticizing her use of object relations theory or the idea that Descartes’ times were especially misogynistic. My critique of

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Bordo’s interpretation of Cartesianism differs from these in problematizing the very possibility to issue an adequate critique from a psychological frame of reference. My interpretation is guided by the wish to give philosophical questions a degree of autonomy. I claim that philosophical problems cannot be solved or undone by empirical—psychological, cultural or social—explanations. I argue that to the extent Descartes’ implicit conception of gender is a genuine philosophical problem, as I think it is, it cannot be solved by a psychocultural explanation. In order to defend the autonomy of philosophy, one does not have to postulate philosophical knowledge as the foundation for all other kinds of knowledge. Contrary to what often seems to be implicated in feminist critiques, philosophy can be autonomous without taking the role of a masterscience.6 The independence of philosophy does not imply that other forms of knowledge, such as everyday experiences or the empirical sciences, loose their independence. It means only that philosophy has its own way of posing questions. Neither does the autonomy of philosophical questions imply their transparency. The argument for autonomy does not deny the existence of hidden implications in philosophical texts, it only claims that these elements are philosophical by nature. The relation between philosophy and its “unthought” has been extensively studied by the French philosopher Michèle le Doeuff. She situates the philosophical unthought in the textual imagery which can be found in any philosophical text. The imagery is an expression of an “unthought” element in a philosophical text. Le Doeuff emphasizes that the imagery must be seen in relation to the philosophical task of the text: one must realize that “imagery copes with problems posed by the theoretical enterprise itself.”7 Philosophical imagery must not be reduced either to the psyche of the author of a text or to the cultural context in which the text was written, but understood in relation to the task of the philosophical text itself. I do not primarily focus on the imagery of Descartes’ writings, but approach the texts through a more “literal” reading. My interest lies in Descartes’ philosophical arguments, on the one hand, and in Bordo’s critique of them on the other. I will attempt a phenomenological reading of the history of philosophy, where the aim is to follow the movement of a philosopher’s thought, rather than present a unified system.8 Thus I will rely on and present an interpretation of Descartes’ thought that partly differs from the standard Anglo-Saxon interpretations which form the basis of most feminist critiques. I will begin by examining in some detail Bordo’s interpretation of Descartes’ mind-body dualism, which forms the basis of her feminist critique. This means that the first two sections are related to issues of more general concern. In the following three sections I will focus on aspects of Bordo’s reading that are more directly related to a feminist

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critique. The final section will discuss questions of the relation between philosophy and its outside, and conclude with a sketch of what I find problematic in Cartesian philosophy.

1. INWARD MENTAL STATES OR INTENTIONAL THOUGHT-ACTS? Bordo presents an extensive feminist critique of Cartesian philosophy, based on her psychocultural account of his work and times.9 She takes Descartes’ methodological doubt as the key to her interpretation and conceives this doubt as an expression of, not only a broader epistemological insecurity, but a general existential anxiety, related to the breakdown of earlier explanations of the world as an organic cosmos. Descartes’ model of knowledge, based on ideal mathematical clarity, dispassion and detachment, is, according to Bordo, a defensive response motivated by a psycho-cultural separation anxiety. Bordo continues by claiming that this defensive response implies a Cartesian masculinization of thought, because the rejected conception of cosmos had feminine connotations. She explores Descartes’ philosophy as “a defensive response to that separation anxiety, an aggressive intellectual ‘flight from the feminine’” and the birth of modern science as “a ‘rebirthing’ and ‘re-imaging’ of knowledge and the world as masculine.” 10 Her claim is strong: she emphasizes that the dominant model of knowledge became masculinized at this specific point in the history of philosophy. There is a historically and philosophically significant change in Western conceptions of masculinity and femininity taking place during the seventeenth century, Bordo claims, and Descartes plays a crucial role in this change. Bordo’s reading of Descartes is based on the claim that he brought a new kind of “detachment” into philosophy; a detachment expressed by the method of doubt and ultimately due to anxiety over separation. Descartes’ process of doubting ends with his assurance of his own existence as a thinking thing.11 Bordo interprets the certainty of the cogito, in combination with the preceding doubt concerning the existence of the external world, as a turn towards a new “inwardness of mental life”, typical of Descartes’ times and given its most extreme form in Cartesian philosophy. She sees the “I think, there fore I am” as a “profound Cartesian experience of self as inwardness.”12 This conception of an inward self is, according to Bordo, “the first real ‘phenomenology’ of the mind,” and it introduces a deep epistemological alienation that separates what is conceived as “occurring ‘in here’ from that which, correspondingly, must lay ‘out there’.”13 Bordo is right in emphasizing the continuity between Cartesian philosophy and


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phenomenology, but, as I will argue, this tradition is not essentially defined by an “inwardness of mental life.” An interpretation emphasizing the “inwardness” aspect of Cartesian philosophy has its roots in Gilbert Ryle’s critique of what he calls a “Cartesian Myth” or the dogma of the “Ghost in the Machine.”14 More recently this interpretation has been advocated by Richard Rorty, who situates the main epistemological problem of modern philosophy in the “gulf between the “inner” and the “outer” and the following insecurity about the existence of an external world. Rorty sees Descartes as the introducer of this idea and Locke as its realiser.15 Descartes’ writings do indeed give textual evidence for an interpretation of the Cartesian mind as an “inner space” or “inner arena”. This conception is most evident in the Principles, where Descartes describes thoughts as happening within us.16 However, the interpretation of Cartesian thinking as essentially “inward” has been questioned and an emphasis on other aspects of his notion of thought can illuminate interesting aspects of his philosophy.17 Thoughts are, according to Descartes, acts performed by the mind or passions that affect the mind. In the Second Meditation, defining what it means to be a thinking thing, Descartes writes: “But what then am I? A thing that thinks. What is that? A thing that doubts, understands, affirms, denies, is willing, is unwilling, and also imagines and has sensory perceptions.”18 These thoughts listed by Descartes are all, in one way or other, related to something. Doubt questions the world, or at its most radical may question the entire existence of a world. Understanding always concerns something understood, acts of willing are directed towards something willed or unwilled, etc. In the next Third Meditation, Descartes specifies the relation between thought-objects and the acts of thought. He writes that “when I will, or am afraid, or affirm, or deny, there is always a particular thing which I take as the object of my thought.”19 This thing may not exist or it may not be what I think it is, but the thought-act is still about something. By focusing on these passages the intentional nature of Cartesian thought-acts is revealed.20 Thought-acts are intentional because they are directed towards the world. The German phenomenologist Edmund Husserl studied how we experience the world and detected intentionality as one of the structural features of experience. Phenomenology studies how we experience the world, and therefore has to first “bracket” all our everyday and scientific preconceptions about the world and its possible mental and physical realities. In his critical interpretation of Husserl’s notion of intentionality, Martin Heidegger emphasizes that “before anything else, [the] structural coherence [of intentionality] must be envisaged freely, without the background presence of any realistic or idealistic theories of consciousness.”21

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The intentional object, according to Husserl, is not located “in” the mind or consciousness, it is part of a structure by which we experience the world. By studying this structure, we can study, among other things, the relation between the “internal” mental and the “external” world. In the essay Cartesian Meditations Husserl explains what intentional analysis is and takes as an example the study of how we perceive external spatial things. He writes that “in the case of perception of a spatial thing, the phenomenologist (abstracting at first from all ‘significance’ predicates and restricting himself purely to the ‘res extensa’) explores the manner in which the changing ‘sight things’, and ‘things’ of the other senses, have in themselves the character of appearances of this same res extensa.”22 The phenomenologist explores the potential and perhaps actual changing perspectives of a chosen spatial thing; furthermore, she studies it with regard to its temporal modes of givenness, and finally with regard to the thought-acts by which the thing is studied, such as the modes of attention. Husserl illuminates the different aspects present when a spatial thing is perceived; the intentional analysis, focusing on an intentional object, an object perceived, opens up possibilities to study what it means to perceive a spatial thing. The mode of analysis Husserl presents resembles Descartes’ famous example in the Second Meditation, where he studies the essential nature of a piece of wax,23 but the outcome is different, mainly because Husserl here emphasizes the role the senses play in perception, while Descartes favors reason. Husserl’s philosophical use of the term “intentionality” is more illuminating as an interpretation of Descartes’ notion of thought than a perspective presupposing that Cartesian thought-objects are “inner” mental representations.24 A location of the intentional object “inside” the mind presupposes a framework where the distinction between a subjective, inner mental world, and an objective, outside physical world, is taken for granted. Phenomenology, at the very outset of its enterprise, questions this kind of presupposition and engages in a study of how the world and its things are perceived as existing.25 Bordo, and the broadly speaking pragmatist tradition she locates herself in,26 deliberately rely on an unquestioned framework described by psychological theories. I claim that Descartes’ notion of thought, and especially the role this notion plays in his proofs that the material world exists and can be known, is better understood in a phenomenological framework than in the naturalist framework Bordo relies on. Descartes work in first philosophy, as opposed to his work in natural philosophy, evidently questions presuppositions and asks how we can know anything about the world. Husserl and the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty both emphasize the Cartesian roots of their phenomenological projects.27 At the beginning of the Cartesian Meditations, Husserl postulates the need to


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renew Descartes’ radicalism, “the radicalism of the beginning philosopher.” Husserl considers the stagnation of his present-time philosophy and the destructive rivalry between philosophy and the empirical sciences, and asks if the disconsolateness of our philosophical position cannot be traced back “ultimately to the fact that the driving forces emanating from the Meditations of Descartes have lost their original vitality.”28 Husserl’s main critique of Cartesian philosophy is that it is not radical enough: there are presuppositions left untouched by Cartesian doubt. He points out that when Descartes doubted in order to establish a foundation of the sciences, he presupposed the model of an axiomatic and deductive geometry as an ideal of all sciences. As a “prejudice this ideal determines philosophies for centuries and hiddenly determines the Meditations themselves.”29 Because of this undoubted prejudice, Descartes was not ultimately successful in his enterprise. The axiomatic and deductive ideal determined Descartes’ ideal of knowledge towards the exclusively clear and distinct. In this way Descartes lost touch with the world as it is immediately presented to the senses. According to Husserl, doubt must be radicalized and the sciences given a new foundation. This critique of Cartesianism is different from Bordo’s, which claims that Descartes introduced an inward mental realm unconnected to the external world. My focus on a phenomenological critique is the first step in my critical analysis of Bordo’s psychological framework. A critique pointing at undoubted presuppositions is relevant as a critique of Bordo as well as of Descartes. From a phenomenological point of view, Bordo relies on an unproblematized presupposition of a distinction between internal mental and external physical states. She assumes that Cartesian thoughts are internal mental states and thereby misses the role Descartes’ doubt and initial concept of thought plays as an attempt to study what constitutes thought and extension. It may be questioned whether the analysis of thought-acts developed by the phenomenological tradition implies any “deep epistemological alienation,” as Bordo claims in her comparison between Cartesianism and phenomenology. The phenomenological method includes a suspension from claims about the existence and value of the objects of our thoughts—the phenomenological reduction or “bracketing” of things30—but this suspension is performed in order to focus on and understand how we, as thinking and feeling beings, experience the world, and hence to come closer to the world rather than to alienate ourselves from it. The development of phenomenology may be seen as an attempt to solve, from inside a Cartesian tradition, the problematic privilege Descartes gave clear and distinct experience of the world, at the expense of diffuse sense experience. It can be claimed that Merleau-Ponty developed Husserl’s conception of the phenomenological reduction further in emphasizing its continuing and

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uncompleted nature. At the beginning of the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty writes that the “most important lesson which the reduction teaches us is the impossibility of a complete reduction.” This is so because the world always bestows its presence in the reduction; as MerleauPonty writes, “indeed our reflections are carried out in the temporal flux on to which we are trying to seize.”32 If we were absolute minds, the reduction would present no problem, but because we are embodied beings in the world, the reduction can never once capture the world in its entirety and therefore never be completed. Descartes’ mistake was to try to complete the reduction and capture the world in a clear and distinct mathematical model. In so doing he overlooked the essential importance of the ungraspable way in which the world is present in our sensations. Descartes’ “rejection of the senses” is not due to the radicality of his doubt, but rather to its insufficiency. I will now turn to a closer discussion of what role Descartes did give sense experience.

2. THE ROLE OF BODY AND SENSES IN CARTESIAN EPISTEMOLOGY Bordo’s discussion of the inwardness of the Cartesian mind is one part of her critique of his mind-body dualism. Its other main part concerns Descartes’ rejection of sense experience. According to Bordo, Descartes attempted to detach himself, as a mind, from his body and other material things on an epistemological as well as on an ontological level. At the epistemological level mind-body dualism appears as a suspicion towards, and even rejection of, sense experience. Bordo appears to think that Descartes’ emphasis on human reason implies a strict dichotomy between reason and sense perception. According to Bordo, Descartes regards all sense experience as illusory and “insists that the object can only truly be known by the perceiver who is willing to purge the mind of all obscurity, all irrelevancy, all free imaginative associations, and all passionate attachments.”33 In emphasizing the “inwardness” of Descartes’ conception of the mind and his suspicion of sense perception, Bordo follows an approved tradition of interpreting Cartesian philosophy. It is clear that Descartes’ writings give grounds for this line of interpretation, but, as we already saw in relation to the question of “inwardness”, Descartes can be interpreted differently. It is important to note that Descartes does not regard sense perception as incompatible with reason.34 He emphasizes that the intellect must evaluate sense perception, but this does not imply a complete rejection of the senses as a source of knowledge. His methodological rejection—or rather bracketing—of sense perception while doubting is temporary and part of


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establishing a foundation of knowledge. When this foundation is established, i.e. when the existence of God and material things is proved, then the senses can, to some extent at least, be relied on, if only correctly evaluated by the intellect. In Principles of Philosophy Descartes describes the proper relation between the will and the intellect in judgments. When a judgment is made, a perception of the intellect is either asserted or denied by the will. It is essential to assert only what the intellect clearly and distinctly perceives. In this way the intellect shall direct the will in judgments. Descartes states that “[w]e fall into error only when we make judgments about things which we have not sufficiently perceived.”35 The senses are, according to Descartes, problematic because they focus on sensory qualities, such as color or smell. These qualities are not part of the clear and distinct idea of what it is to be an extended substance and therefore they do not tell us about the real nature of a thing.36 In this sense Bordo is right when she claims that Descartes regards the senses as illusory.37 The relation between the intellect and the senses is, according to Descartes, hierarchical to the extent that the intellect, instead of the senses, must guide the will, and, as far as it is possible, also guide the senses through the will. But, contrary to Bordo’s claim, this hierarchy does not imply a contradiction between senses and intellect or a complete rejection of the senses. It is possible to have clear and distinct ideas of external material things: this requires that we perceive them as extended substance, to which belongs size, shape, motion, position and divisibility of component parts.38 We have to experience things in order to be able to know them and this experience requires sense perception. In his early Rules, where he attempted to formulate a scientific method as a guarantee of certainty, Descartes distinguishes purely intellectual and purely material simple natures.39 The perception of an intellectual simple nature requires only the use of the intellect, while the perception of a material simple nature requires the additional use of imagination and sense perception. In Rule XII Descartes writes that “[i]t is of course only the intellect that is capable of perceiving the truth, but it has to be assisted by imagination, sense-perception and memory if we are not to omit anything which lies within our power.”40 Science, with mathematical physics at its core, is based on material simple natures, while metaphysics, or first philosophy as Descartes prefers to call it, is based on intellectual simple natures and use of the intellect alone.41 This approval of the senses does not belong only to Descartes’ early “pre-doubting” philosophy. In a letter to Princess Elisabeth, written in June 1643, two years after the publication of the Meditations, Descartes separates three kinds of knowledge. He emphasizes that the soul is best known by metaphysical thoughts involving only the pure intellect, while bodies, their shapes and motions are best known by the intellect aided by the

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imagination. The intellect and imagination together give us mathematical knowledge and help us “form very distinct notions of body.” Finally, the union of mind and body—of which all human beings are composed—is best known by the senses and “the ordinary course of life and conversation.”42 Descartes does think that it is possible, under certain circumstances, to “think without the body”, and Bordo is, to this extent, right in pointing it out.43 The problem is that she takes this “pure intellection” to be the ultimate Cartesian ideal for all modes of thinking. This is not the case, because the body has an irreducible function in all thinking except this pure metaphysical thinking and is an essential condition for the activity of natural science.44 Bordo, together with many other feminist critics of Descartes’ philosophy, is especially concerned with the role he played in the development of a modern philosophy of science. Therefore it would be important for these critics to take seriously the role Descartes gives sense perception in scientific activity, and not just focus on his conception of pure metaphysical thoughts and take this kind of thoughts as representative for his general notion of thought. While Bordo’s claim about Descartes’ complete rejection of the senses has to be modified, it is still true that he excludes sense-experience to a problematic extent. The problem is related to the primacy Descartes gives a mathematical description of the extended world. He does not trust his senseexperiences or, in his own terminology, his passions as testimonies of what the world is like. The real nature of the material world can be known only by the intellect’s clear and distinct ideas of extended substance. Thus Descartes gives metaphysical primacy to the world as it is known according to rules provided by mathematical physics. The world as experienced by the passions is important for our survival as embodied human beings, as Descartes explains in the Sixth Meditation,45 but is not reliable as a description of its real nature. The problem is that Descartes does not consider the role the passions have for our philosophical understanding of the world.

3. THE ROLE OF GOD As an important part of her critique of Descartes’ alleged rejection of the senses, Bordo claims that he regards sense experience as illusory because it is “impure”. According to Bordo, Cartesian privileged knowledge requires that the knower is purified.46 Her claim that Cartesian epistemology is a process of “purification”, takes us into a discussion of the role of God in Cartesian philosophy and, in the next section, the impact of some metaphors in Descartes’ text. These topics give a more concrete form to Bordo’s claim


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about a Cartesian masculinization and introduce her attempt to make a psychocultural interpretation of Descartes’ thought and times. In order to argue that Cartesianism is aiming at purity, Bordo claims that Descartes is in a hubric way perfecting his Godly intellect, at least implicitly aiming to reach God’s place. Descartes plays, according to Bordo, a central role in a “historical movement away from a transcendent God as the only legitimate object of worship to the establishing of the human intellect as godly, and as appropriately to be revered and submitted to.”47 Bordo interprets the role of God in Cartesian philosophy as a “father of oneself fantasy”, by which “all generativity and creativity fall to God, the spiritual father, rather than to the female “flesh” of the world.“48 This fantasy is expressed by the way Descartes, after doubting the evidence of his senses, rebuilds the world by using his reason only. In Bordo’s account God is strengthening Descartes’ hierarchical dichotomy between the mental, equated with the spiritual, and the material. Bordo claims that Descartes needs a benevolent God in order to bridge the gulf between the “inner” and the “outer” and “to provide a reassurance of permanence and connection between self and world.”49 The problem is specific for Descartes’ times, according to Bordo, because during the earlier Renaissance, when an organic conception of the Cosmos prevailed, the connection between the self and the world had not been questioned. This turn from an alleged organic female universe to a modern scientific universe, guarded by a father of oneself fantasy, is the process Bordo calls the “Cartesian masculinization of thought.” It is correct to emphasize the role of God in Descartes’ philosophical thought, where the proofs of the existence and veracity of God play an essential epistemological role. But when emphasizing the role of God it is important to understand Descartes’ conceptions of God and man, as well as their relation. It is also necessary to realize that the God present in Descartes’ philosophical writings is a philosophical, rather than theological, idea. God plays an essential role as a principle of truth and, I think most importantly, acts as a positive infinity, which both makes human knowledge possible and restricts it. Bordo assumes that the human intellect, in Cartesian philosophy, approaches the Godly because it is perfect. She writes that Descartes conceives error as caused by the wrong use of “the humanly perfect faculties given to us by God.”50 She acknowledges our human nature, but does not realize that this nature, according to Descartes, implies that we are finite beings and limited in our perfections. We resemble God by having an infinite will, but our intellect is finite, and we err if we do not take the limitations of our intellect into account.51 In order to understand Descartes’ conception of God, one has to acknowledge the distinction between the finite and the infinite, which in

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Descartes’ philosophy, as well as in the philosophies of his predecessors and contemporaries, irreducibly separates human capacities from the Godly realm. The distinction between the finite human realm and an infinite God plays an important role in Descartes’ proof of God’s existence and veracity. In the Third Meditation, Descartes points out that he has the idea of himself as a substance, but “this would not account for my having the idea of an infinite substance, when I am finite, unless this idea proceeded from some substance which really was infinite.”52 This proof is based on Descartes having a positive idea of the infinite and can be criticized by questioning whether we do have any such positive idea, or rather know the infinite only as a negation of the finite. However this critique does not affect the fact that Descartes did claim he had such an idea and that it played an essential role in his conceptualization of the relation between humans and God. Descartes’ proofs of God’s existence are essentially based on the difference between God the Creator and created humans, and it is therefore absurd to see these proofs as a “father of oneself” fantasy. Most importantly the distinction between an infinite God and finite humans brings an element of humility into Descartes’ philosophy, which Bordo’s reading is unable to recognize. In accepting and emphasizing that humans are finite beings, Descartes recognizes that they often are subject to error. Discussing the fact that a man may be “tricked by the pleasant taste of some food into eating the poison concealed inside it” in the Sixth Meditation, Descartes writes that “this is not surprising, since man is a limited thing, and so it is only fitting that his perfection should be limited.”53 One can even say that Descartes, despite his unquestionable aim at clarity, to some extent accepts the ambiguity of our human condition. According to Bordo’s interpretation, Descartes’ “father of oneself fantasy, expressed by his striving for purity, is ultimately an expression of anxiety over separation. I will now turn to Bordo’ s claims about Cartesian philosophy as an expression of an “experiential authenticity” and first discuss the role of metaphors in this scheme of interpretation.

4. IMPURE THOUGHTS Bordo argues that although Descartes’ doubt is manifestly expressed in epistemological terms, we must view it as a psychological anxiety over separation. This anxiety is caused by the early modern collapsing of the universe of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, which is claimed to have been organic and female.54 Besides being expressed by doubt as such, Bordo argues that the “experiential authenticity” of Cartesian anxiety is expressed in Descartes’ use of metaphors referring to contamination, corruption and deceit. She is especially interested in the metaphors


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Descartes uses in order to motivate his doubt, and she emphasizes that these metaphors express an anxiety which cannot be explained or understood in purely epistemological terms. Bordo wants to ask “why the mind should require such a ferocious purging as Descartes attempts, in order to relieve itself of ‘prejudice’ and reject the ‘merely probable’.”55 I agree with Bordo in taking these metaphors seriously, but I argue that her attempt to interpret their significance psychologically instead of philosophically is problematic. According to Bordo, metaphors express emotion, “experiential authenticity”, which can be given a psychological interpretation, and therefore they have an indirect philosophical significance: they express the cultural and emotional context which shape philosophy. It is important to note that contrary to those feminist philosophers who emphasize the philosophical significance of the imagery used in philosophical texts, Bordo does not claim that these metaphors are significant in themselves, but rather that they express psychocultural motives behind the text. As her main example, Bordo uses the metaphor about a basket of apples, which Descartes presents in his replies to the seventh set of objections to the Meditations. Here Descartes compares the task of separating false beliefs from true ones to the separation of rotten and sound apples. He asks his critic to suppose he “had a basket full of apples and, being worried that some of the apples were rotten, wanted to take out the rotten ones to prevent the rot spreading. How would he proceed? Would he not begin by tipping the whole lot out of the basket? And would not the next step be to cast his eye over each apple in turn, and pick up and put back in the basket only those he saw to be sound, leaving the others?”56 In the same way the philosopher must first doubt all his beliefs, then scrutinize them all carefully and accept only the ones that cannot be doubted. From the viewpoint of Bordo’s psychological interpretation this metaphor expresses a deep, in her terminology “experiential” and “authentic”, fear of contamination: our true beliefs may be infected by false ones, as sound apples may be infected by rotten ones. Bordo draws the conclusion that Descartes is deeply concerned with the need to protect purity by excluding what is rotten. She calls him an epistemological “dirt-rejecter”, who has a dichotomic conception of a good “inside” and a bad “outside”, and a compulsive need to expel “bad” sense experience.57 This experiential fear of contaminating falsity motivates, according to Bordo, Descartes’ need for an absolute doubt, that is, his need to doubt all his beliefs before he can establish any belief as true, instead of doubting his beliefs one by one and picking out the false ones. Bordo argues against Anthony Kenny, who has claimed Descartes’ radical doubt to be a misguided presupposition for which he offers no proof. According to Kenny, it would be sufficient for Descartes to examine his beliefs one by

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one and reject the false ones.58 Bordo claims that to “regard Descartes’s extraordinary epistemological requirement as merely an unfounded presupposition is to miss the psychological thrust of the [apple basket] simile and to fail to take the imagery of contamination and corruption seriously enough.”59 Bordo is right in criticizing Kenny’s view, but I would claim they both miss the nature of the philosophical problem at issue in Descartes’ doubt, that is, his need to establish a foundation for the possibility of knowledge. They misinterpret the problem Descartes presents in the First Meditation.60 They expect that he is attempting to distinguish true and false ideas according to a pre-existing concept of truth, while in fact he is attempting to establish a concept of truth, i.e. decide what kinds of ideas can be claimed to be true, and therefore has to doubt everything he has presupposed. Philosophically interpreted, I think the apple basket metaphor attempts to emphasize the difficulty in separating ideas from each other, which is a requirement for them being distinct.61 A false idea is “contaminant” because it cannot easily be distinguished from a true one. The necessity to empty the entire basket pictures the foundational nature of Cartesian doubt. Descartes is not empirically comparing different ideas in order to separate true and false ones, but searching for the most basic idea, which can be found only when all ideas are “bracketed”—or taken out of the basket. Only then is Descartes able to recognize the foundational nature of the cogito, his own existence as a thinking thing. According to Bordo Descartes’ absolutism is not a philosophical assumption, but a “perspective on reality.”62 Her claim is justified in the sense that Descartes’ doubt is a kind of perspective on reality, a “bracketing” or questioning attitude, taken in order to find a basis for the possibility of knowledge. But contrary to Bordo’s interpretation, I claim that this perspective is not essentially psychological. Descartes’ problem is metaphysical rather than psychological. We cannot understand his philosophy without taking his metaphysical problems seriously. Bordo also emphasizes that the threat of contamination affects Descartes’ cognitive capacities themselves, not merely particular beliefs, and this makes the threat all the more serious. Again, her claim is justified to the extent that it is not simply a question of the truth of particular beliefs, but Descartes’ problem is his lack of a foundation for the possibility of knowledge, not distrust in his psychological capacities.63


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5. THE “EXPERIENTIAL AUTHENTICITY” OF CARTESIAN DOUBT Bordo attempts to analyze the “experiential authenticity” expressed by the Cartesian texts with the help of conceptual tools provided by psychological and psychoanalytical theory.64 She is conscious of the problems inherent in any attempt to apply contemporary psychological concepts to premodern texts. Thus she emphasizes that, unlike “gender difference” theorists like Chodorow, her “use of developmental theory focuses, not on gender difference, but on very general categories—individuation, separation anxiety, object permanence—in an attempt to explore their relevance to existential and epistemological changes brought about by the dissolution of the organic, finite, maternal universe of the Middle Ages and Renaissance.”65 Bordo contrasts her critique with that of feminists like Evelyn Fox Keller who, Bordo claims, unlike herself, is trying to explain early modern “cognitive styles” and scientific values by a characteristically male course of psychological development, as described by Nancy Chodorow.66 According to Fox Keller, whose historical study primarily concerns Bacon’s philosophy of science, the early modern subject of knowledge is not only a “flight from the feminine”, in Bordo’s sense, that is a flight from a certain cultural representation of a female Cosmos, but also an explicitly masculine epistemological position or cognitive style, and as such ill-suited for women. Fox Keller transfers conclusions from the context of developmental psychology into an epistemological context and claims that the objectivizing detachment, introduced by early modern writers developing the methodology and theory of science and still dominating contemporary philosophy of science, is a masculine position of knowledge.67 Bordo also claims that Cartesian dualistic and objectivistic rationalism is a masculine mode of knowledge, and even “a masculine cognitive style,”68 but only because it is a flight from the feminine to “objectivity,” not because it corresponds to a specific masculine psychological development as opposed to a feminine development. The Cartesian subject is the outcome of a “psychocultural birth—of ‘inwardness,’ of ‘subjectivity,’ of locatedness in space and time.”69 The early modern epistemic subject shows, according to Bordo, structural similarities with the development of an infant as it is described by developmental psychology. She emphasizes, however, that she does not aim at explaining the gender of this subject by any psychological theory. The separation is masculine because the subject separates itself from a symbolically feminine Medieval Cosmos, not because it is an outcome of a certain psychological mechanism that is typical to males. Thus Bordo attempts to locate the masculinization of

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thought on the level of cultural representation rather than psychological development. She argues that Cartesian masculinization of thought “is one intellectual “moment” of an acute historical flight from the feminine, from the memory of union with the maternal world, and a rejection of all values associated with it.”70 Instead of applying a developmental gender difference theory to compare the (early) modern epistemic subject with a specific male identity, Bordo, in her own words, takes the “psychological (and often psychoanalytic) categories of ‘anxiety,’ ‘dread,’ ‘denial,’ ‘reactionformation,’ and ‘escape’ very seriously as hermeneutical tools.”71 Her main focus is directed towards psychological accounts of the process of the infant’s separation from the symbiosis with its mother. This process always contains an aspect of anxiety, and this anxiety is the developmental correlate to the anxiety Bordo claims to find expressed in Descartes’ writings, especially in his descriptions of his doubt. Separation anxiety is perfectly normal and the child usually learns to control it, but it never vanishes, it “reverberates throughout the life cycle.”72 Bordo asks if this process may not also “reverberate” on a cultural level, in the sense that some cultural eras may compensate for separation anxiety better than others. She claims that Descartes and his contemporaries were thrown into an especially deep anxiety, because they lived during the breakdown of an earlier organic and symbolically female world. As in the child’s case a reunion with the mother is impossible, a reunion with the Medieval and Renaissance conception of a mother world was impossible for Descartes and his contemporaries, and “only God the father can provide the reassurance Descartes needs.”73 Here Bordo is very close to the Chodorowian perspective, where it is exactly the male child’s stronger need to separate himself from the mother and identify himself with a more distant father that leads to a detached attitude, although Bordo regards “the mother” and “the father” as symbolic formations, cultural representations of Mother Earth and God the Father. Bordo transfers her use of psychological concepts and categories to a level of cultural and symbolic entities and in this way tries to avoid an individualized psychologization. However she has to postulate a level of cultural representation and the possibility to use psychological concepts in an analysis of this level—a theoretical postulate which is in its own regard problematic. This combination of psychological and cultural elements composes what Bordo calls her psychocultural analysis. She refers to the probability of a cultural “reverberation” of anxiety, and mentions the use of psychoanalytical perspectives in cultural studies, but she does not present any methodological reflections to authorize the use of psychological hypotheses and theories on the level of cultural analysis. Bordo emphasizes


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that she does not want to make “any general theoretical claims about the relationship of phylogeny and ontogeny,”74 but rather use psychological concepts and categories as hermeneutical tools. Despite her caution, Bordo’s theoretical approach gives rise to several critical questions. First, it has to be asked whose experience is at issue? The postulation of a shared cultural experience presupposes a collective subject who has this experience, but Bordo does not discuss who or what this subject is. Second, one has to ask if psychological categories are applicable to such a subject. Bordo’s strategy is based on a number of problematic presuppositions. She assumes that a text expresses a certain experience, which can be detected and analyzed by psychological or psychoanalytical tools. Bordo seems to think it is sufficient that Descartes’ texts contain passages which can be interpreted as expressing “anxiety” or “denial” in order to draw the conclusion that these passages essentially do express these experiences. Further, she presupposes that the meaning that is thus detected is, if not the meaning of the text, at least one of its essential meanings. The presupposition is that the philosophical meaning of a text can be captured by psychological concepts and methods. This assumption is in itself reductionist: it reduces philosophical problems to a level of psychological categories. For example, Bordo characterized the Cartesian masculinization as the flight from “the memory of union with the maternal world.” The use of the concept of “memory” here exemplifies the problem involved in Bordo’s psychocultural approach: it is not at all evident whose memories are referred to. Does Bordo refer to individual memories common among people living in the seventeenth century or some kind of collective memory shared by these people? Studying her presuppositions more carefully, Bordo herself would probably see as most problematic the assumption that a given text expresses an experience “behind” the text. This is because she situates her work in a “post-structuralist” framework,75 where one does not presuppose that a text “emerges from experience,” but rather argues that experiences are constructed in discursive contexts. If experience is seriously taken to be a discursive construct, it becomes problematic to use concepts derived from psychology to analyze this experience. The postulation of a “collective subject” is also problematic in a post-structuralist framework, and Bordo does not discuss this problem either, but seems to regard the presupposed collective subject as some kind of discursive construct.

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6. PHILOSOPHY AND ITS OUTSIDE These hidden presuppositions constitute the main difference between Bordo’s critique and a more rigorously textual attempt to uncover unthought elements in a philosophical text. From the viewpoint of a textual feminist strategy, these problems compose the main defect in Bordo’s model of interpretation. From my phenomenological point of view, the main problem with Bordo’s approach is her readiness to reduce any question of philosophical meaning and significance to an explanation based on empirically confirmable causes. The problem concerns the role of philosophy itself, and especially the question of philosophy’s autonomy in the face of external—historical, psychological or sociological—models of explanation. This question can be concretized by looking at one of the textual fragments which are most open to a psychoanalytic explanation or interpretation: Descartes’ three dreams, which he had on November 10, 1619, and wrote down in his diary under the title “Olympica”.76 The first interpretation made of these dreams was Descartes’ own philosophical interpretation, made on the edge of wakening, according to which the dreams guided him on his way to find the idea of a wonderful unified science. Bordo perceives these dreams, or, as she prefers to call them, “nightmares”, as one initial sign of the “dark forces” at work behind Descartes’ rationalist facade.77 A psychoanalytic interpretation of Descartes’ dreams and doubt, like the one Bordo presents, is possible and may in its own context be illuminative, but the question is whether it is relevant as a philosophical interpretation, and ultimately if these dreams have a philosophical content, which cannot be reduced to historical and psychological causes. The French Descartes scholar Jean-Luc Marion has commented on these dual possibilities to interpret Descartes’ dreams. Analyzing the philosophical consequences of the interpretation Descartes gave his dreams and the role of the dreams as part of Descartes’ philosophical corpus, Marion writes that “Freudian or Jungian psychoanalytic interpretations are undeniably legitimate, but they cannot establish the philosophical worth of these dreams, which only becomes apparent in relation to philosophy itself.”78 I agree that even in the case of Descartes’ dreams, a psychoanalytical interpretation does not as such—or even in combination with a cultural analysis—reveal the philosophical significance of the text.79 In a corresponding way Descartes’ method of doubt gets its philosophical significance as a part of Cartesian philosophy and in relation to the history of philosophy before and after Descartes, not from its structural similarities with infant development.


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The question of capturing the philosophical significance is not a problem Bordo herself would regard as defeating her interpretation. She takes an explicitly naturalizing approach to questions of philosophical meaning and does not find any significant difference between the philosophical and, for example psychological or sociocultural meaning of a text. In the light of a naturalized approach, she does not have to give any specific status to the meaning that contributes to the philosophical task of the text. It is assumed that this meaning can be reduced to its psychological and historical causes. She is ready to deny the existence of an irreducible philosophical content, the existence of “philosophy itself”. In the introduction to The Flight to Objectivity, Bordo appreciatingly refers to attempts to objectify philosophy. She points out that in “many different academic arenas, from history of science to literary theory, we find fewer and fewer open adherents to the Cartesian dream; more and more have begun to critically objectify it: to historize it, to psychoanalyze it, to deconstruct it.”80 The importance of Richard Rorty’s work, according to Bordo, is due to his making it “legitimate for philosophers, once again, to talk about the history and methodology of our discipline in naturalist terms—that is, as having developed among human creatures with biological, social, and psychological inclinations—rather than as having been determined by absolute, timeless requirements of Truth, Reason, and so on.”81 Bordo is certainly right in her conviction that the knowing subject is embodied and situated in time, but I claim that the objectifying of philosophy, ultimately necessary for any attempt to discuss it in naturalist terms, is not the best way to situate reason or philosophy. In an essay on the principles of writing the history of philosophy, Maurice Merleau-Ponty is concerned with exactly the relation between philosophy and its historical, social and individual “outside.” MerleauPonty emphasizes that it is not a question of either embracing the idea of a universal truth exhibiting itself in the history of philosophy, or reducing philosophical thought to external causes. He writes that “philosophy lives from everything which happens to the philosopher and his times. But it throws it out of focus or transports it into the order of symbols and of the truth it utters, so that there is no more sense in judging the works by the life than the life by the works.”82 Merleau-Ponty points out that we can replace the internal study of philosophy with a socio-historical explanation only if we clearly know the course and meaning of the history in question. This knowledge is illusory; history cannot be known in such an absolute way, and the attempt to explain philosophy by historical causes is just the postulation of an alternative absolute philosophy, concealed in a socio-historical explanation. “A conception of history explains philosophies only on the condition that it becomes philosophy,” as Merleau-Ponty formulates the dilemma. A

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totalizing external explanation is no real alternative, because it is as absolutist as the idea of a pure unbound philosophy. Arguing against a reductionist Marxist explanation, Merleau-Ponty emphasizes that the “partisans of ‘pure’ philosophy and those of socio-economic explanation exchange roles before our very eyes.”83 Bordo does not intend her interpretation to be reductive or absolute. On the contrary, she emphasizes that she does not present any theory, but only uses psychological concepts as “hermeneutical tools.” The problem is that once the element of external explanation is introduced, it takes over the scene. Bordo ends up claiming that the ethos of Descartes’ method of doubt is a psychological masculinization of thought. Her totalizing conclusion is a good example of the duality Merleau-Ponty criticizes: the “Cartesian masculinization” is as much a determined product of her psychocultural model of interpretation as the idea of pure, universal reason is the product of an ideal of unbound philosophy. Can this duality of absolutisms be avoided? Merleau-Ponty thinks it is possible, but there is no single magical method to be followed. First one has to take each philosophical idea as it is: “never unburdened of historical import and never reducible to its origins.” Merleau-Ponty emphasizes that philosophical ideas, though emerging in the ebb and flow of personal and social history, are never simply results of things. A philosophical idea is always also a beginning, and in order to understand it one has to “show how its significance exceeds its circumstances, and how as an historical fact it transmutes its original situation into a means of understanding it and other situations.”84 Rather than being explained, a philosophical thought or idea has to be kept alive and in movement. An important part of following the movement of a philosophical thought is to pay attention to the inner differences and discordances in the work of a philosopher. Here, as so often, Merleau-Ponty uses Descartes as his example.85 The basic contradiction in Cartesian philosophy, which MerleauPonty sees as a key to this philosophy, concerns the relation between Descartes’ striving for clear and distinct knowledge and his emphasis on the unique nature of human beings as compounds of mind and body. Descartes cannot be understood solely through his dualism, but only through his peculiar attempt to combine dualism and unity. In an other essay MerleauPonty writes that “Descartes conceived more clearly than anyone else the distinction between body and soul, and for that very reason he saw better than anyone else the paradox of their union in the practice of life.”86 Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Descartes is guided by the idea, introduced by Husserl, of phenomenology as the radicalization of Cartesian philosophy. In the Crisis, when developing his most elaborate critique of Cartesian philosophy, Husserl emphasizes that Descartes played a dual role in the development of philosophical thought: he developed a mathematical


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model of knowledge, excluding from the basis of philosophy the world as it is experienced by the senses, but he also introduced the “Cartesian epoché,” which ultimately, in its phenomenological derivation, was going to uproot his mathematical model.87 When the epoché or reduction is continued, and not sacrificed for a presupposed mathematical model, it reveals the lifeworld, the world as it is perceived by the senses, by a cogito living in the world. Husserl, and after him Merleau-Ponty, conceive the life-world as the foundation which makes all our perceptions of the world meaningful. In this sense mathematical—or psychological—models are dependent on the lifeworld. Husserl emphasizes the importance of Descartes’ doubt, against Descartes’ mathematical ideal, as a foundation of philosophy, and MerleauPonty emphasizes doubt, as well as Descartes’ specific interest in the human compositum of soul and body, thought-acts and passions, as the groundbreaking Cartesian achievements.88 Merleau-Ponty’s critique of Descartes’ thought concerns the privilege Descartes gives the body known as an extended object over the lived experience of one’s own body.89 Descartes does recognize the irreducible nature of the body as it is experienced by the passions, but when it comes to giving a metaphysical definition of body, he uses the clear and distinct idea of an extended substance. Merleau-Ponty writes that in Descartes the “peculiar knowledge of our body, which we enjoy from the mere fact that we are a body, remains subordinated to our knowledge of it through the medium of ideas.”90 Following these readings, the crucial problems in Cartesian philosophy—also from a feminist point of view—are not an anxious doubt and rejection of the senses and a feminine cosmos, but an insufficient doubt, which is not persistent enough to reveal the life-world. Descartes’ conception of matter as an extended substance, following the rules of mathematical physics, excludes the possibility of conceiving sexual difference as anything except an anatomical detail necessary for reproduction. Descartes developed the possibility for a far-reaching equality based on the similarity between the sexes and their rational capacities,91 but his metaphysical framework was unable to take into account differences when they appeared in the lived experience of the passions. It is interesting to note that this problem is addressed in the correspondence between Princess Elisabeth and Descartes. Elisabeth is suffering from diverse psychosomatic disorders and a body, which she complains is “filled with a great many of the weaknesses of [her] sex; it very easily feels the afflictions of the soul and does not have the force to bring itself into harmony with the soul.”92 She is here questioning the adequacy of the Stoic remedy Descartes prescribes her, based on the soul’s capacity to turn its attention away from bodily sufferings, and explicitly refers to her experience of her sexed body.

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Elisabeth’s implicit critique concerns the very foundations of Cartesian philosophy—its ability to combine thought and extension—and I think it is here that we as feminists must look for problems. To the extent that Descartes gives the distinction between the soul and the body philosophical primacy he cannot provide an adequate philosophical understanding of the relation between thought and extension. In order to understand how the body thinks, moves and suffers, one has to give philosophical primacy to the concept of the lived body and to experience as it is expressed by the passions. This is also the only way to understand the meaning of the sexed body. Otherwise we have only an equality based on similar souls and neutral bodies—which I think is the most problematic unthought element in Cartesian philosophy.

NOTES 1

I thank Lilli Alanen, Sara Heinämaa and Juha Himanka for discussions and comments on earlier versions of this article. 2 The first extensive attempt to uncover gendered biases in philosophical texts was Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986, first published in French 1974). Some of the philosophically most interesting studies have been made by Michèle Le Doeuff, The Philosophical Imaginary, trans. Colin Gordon (London: The Athlone Press, 1989, first published in French 1980) and Hipparchia’s Choice: An Essay Concerning Women, Philosophy, etc. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991, first published in French 198?). The first textual study published in English was Genevieve Lloyd, The Man of Reason: ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ in Western Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1993, first published 1984), see especially the preface to the second edition and Genevieve Lloyd, “Maleness, Metaphor and the ‘Crisis’ of Reason,” in A Mind of One’s Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity, ed. Louise M. Anthony and Charlotte Witt (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993) for reflections on the question of method in feminist textual analysis. The most extensive textual study of Descartes’ writings has been made by Dalia Judovitz, Subjectivity and Representation in Descartes: The Origins of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); and The Culture of the Body: Genealogies of Modernity (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2001). The latter work is directly related to issues of sexual difference. 3 Susan Bordo, The Flight to Objectivity: Essays on Cartesianism and Culture (Albany: The Pensylvania State University Press, 1987). Other psychological attempts to uncover unthought elements in philosophical texts are Jane Flax, “Political Philosophy and the Patriarchal Unconscious: A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Epistemology and Metaphysics,” in Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science, ed. Sandra Harding and Merrill B. Hintikka (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1983) and Naomi Scheman, “Though This Be Method, Yet There Is Madness in It: Paranoia and Liberal Epistemology,” in A Mind of One’s Own, ed. Anthony and Witt. 4 See e.g. Eve Browning Cole, Philosophy and Feminist Criticism: An Introduction (New York: Paragon House, 1993), 54-7, 63-5 and 130. 5 See Margaret Atherton, “Cartesian Reason and Gendered Reason,” in A Mind of One’s Own, ed. Anthony and Witt.

PSYCHOLOGIZING CARTESIAN DOUBT 6

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See e.g. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1991). 7 Le Doeuff, The Philosophical Imaginary, 5. 8 See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Everywhere and Nowhere,” in Signs, trans. Richard C. Cleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964, first published in French 1956), 126-33. I thank Sara Heinämaa for discussions on the implications of a phenomenological reading of the history of philosophy. 9 See Bordo, The Flight to Objectivity, 3, where she writes that “[m]y interpretation of the Meditations is not only informed by a cultural context, but by a psychocultural framework.” 10 Ibid., 5. 11 Descartes describes his method of doubt in Discourse on the Method and the Meditations. See The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vol. I, ed. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, hereafter cited as CSM I), 127, and The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vol. II, ed. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, hereafter cited as CSM II), 12-5. Descartes doubts the evidence of his senses, the existence of material bodies and in the Meditations he finally doubts the existence of mathematical truths. The final doubt concerning mathematical truths is due to the possibility of a deus deceptor, a deceiving God. The assurance of one’s own existence as a thinking thing is in the Discourse expressed by the clear and distinct idea of cogito ergo sum and in the Meditations by the proposition Ego sum, ego existo, which is true whenever I think it, see CSM II, 17. 12 Bordo, The Flight to Objectivity, 60. 13 Ibid., 55. 14 Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (London: Hutchinson’s University Library, 1949). 15 Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), 457. Bordo’s reading of Descartes’ philosophy is strongly inspired by Rorty’s work and when discussing the aspect of “inwardness” she frequently refers to his hypothesis of a Cartesian “invention of the mind” and his conceptualization of the Cartesian mind as an “inner arena” of ideas. See e.g. Bordo, The Flight to Objectivity, 49 and 51. Bordo’s only critique of Rorty’s perspective is his lack of a psychological or psychoanalytical conceptualization, ibid., 4. Though Bordo’s argumentation is strongly guided by a Rortyan perspective, her own readings of Descartes’ texts are, compared to Rorty’s, much more detailed and complex. 16 CSM I, 195. 17 A Cartesian “inner arena” is at least partly a projection of a twentieth century discussion about internal mental states. For a critical discussion of this topic, see Lilli Alanen “Descartes’s Dualism and the Philosophy of Mind,” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 3 (1989): 391-413. 18 CSM II, 19. 19 Ibid., 26. 20 This aspect of Cartesian thoughts has been pointed out and discussed by Lilli Alanen, “Cartesian Ideas and Intentionality” in Language, Knowledge and Intentionality: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Jaakko Hintikka, ed. Leila Haaparanta, Martin Kush and Ilkka Niiniluoto (Helsinki: Acta Philosophica Fennica Vol. 49, 1990). See also Lilli Alanen, Descartes’s Concept of Mind, Harvard University Press, 2003. The notion of intentionality was first used in the Middle Ages by Scholastic philosophers and (re)introduced to twentieth century philosophy by Franz Brentano in his famous definition of mental phenomena. Brentano described intentionality as “reference to a content, direction towards an object” and he wrote that “[e]very mental phenomenon includes something as object within itself, although they do not all do so in the same way. In presentation something is presented, in judgment something is affirmed or denied, in love loved, in hate hated, in desire desired and so on,” see Franz Brentano, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, trans. D. B. Terrell,

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Antos C. Rancurello and Linda L. McAlister (London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973, first published in German 1874), 88-9. 21 Martin Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, trans. T. Kisel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1985), 36. 22 Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, trans. Dorion Crains (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff 1988, first published 1950), 47-8. 23 Here Descartes studies what we can know about the nature of material things. He excludes the changing attributes perceived by the senses, such as smell and color, and concludes that the essential attribute of a material thing, extension, can be known only by the intellect. On the other hand we have to have a sense perception of a material thing in order to be able to study it with the intellect. See CSM II, 20-1. 24 It should be noted that Husserl himself attributes a rudimentary notion of intentionality to Descartes’ concept of thought. In the Crisis, after criticizing various aspects of Descartes’ thought, he writes that “one element ... remains to be brought out expressly as highly significant, though completely undeveloped: intentionality [...]. Another word for it is cogitatio, having something consciously [etwas bewussthaben], e.g., in experiencing, thinking, feeling, willing, etc.; for every cogitatio has its cogitatum.” See Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1989, first published in German 1954), 82. 25 See e.g. Edmund Husserl, The Idea of Phenomenology, trans. William P. Alston and George Nakhnikian (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973, first published in German 1950), 22; Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time, 36; and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New York and London: Routledge, 1962, first published in French 1945), viii-xi. 26 See e.g. Bordo, The Flight to Objectivity, 81. 27 See Husserl, The Idea of Phenomenology, 23; Cartesian Meditations, 1-3; and MerleauPonty, Phenomenology of Perception, ix. Sara Heinämaa has convincingly showed how Husserl and Merleau-Ponty link their philosophical work to the Cartesian tradition. See Sara Heinämaa, “From Decisions to Passions: Merleau-Ponty’s Interpretation of Husserl’s Reduction,” in Merleau-Ponty’s Reading of Husserl, ed. Lester Embree and Ted Toadvine (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2002). 28 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 5-6. 29 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 7. Descartes did doubt mathematical truths, believing they might have been implanted in him by some malicious demon. See CSM II, 14-5. But Husserl claims that he did not doubt the mathematical ideal as a guiding principle for the science he was founding. See also Husserl, Crisis, 76. Husserl himself used geometry as a model when he described the nature of phenomenology, but in addition to similarities he emphasized some essential differences. Phenomenology and geometry are both material eidetic sciences concerned with material essences or ideal beings, as opposed to empirical sciences concerned with inductive studies of individuals. The problem with the philosophical role Descartes gives universal mathematics, according to Husserl, is his belief that we can in all domains of phenomena seek after definite systems of axioma upon which to erect deductive theories. For a precise description of the relation between phenomenology and geometry, see Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. W. R. Boyce Gibson (London: Collier Macmillan, 1962, first published in German 1913), 184-193. For an illuminating study of Husserl’s use of the model of geometry, see Leila Haaparanta, “The Model of Geometry in Logic and Phenomenology,” Philosophia Scientiae 1: 2 (1996): 2-14. 30 Husserl developed his conceptualization of the phenomenological reduction from when he introduced it publicly in lectures during the first decade of the twentieth century, until his death in 1938. The phenomenological reduction is best characterized as a mode of asking questions. In a study of Husserl’s early presentation of the reduction, Juha Himanka points


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out that reduction “which makes up the specific nature of phenomenological research ... is different from principles of philosophy because it is not a statement but an act, something to be accomplished,” Juha Himanka, “Reduction In Concreto: Two Readings of the Idea of Phenomenology,” Recherches Husserliennes 11 (1999), 53. 31 Arguing against scholars who claim that Merleau-Ponty rejected the possibility of a phenomenological reduction and thereby naturalized phenomenology, Sara Heinämaa has given textual evidence that he in fact attempted to radicalize the reduction. See Heinämaa, “From Decisions to Passions,” and also Sara Heinämaa, “Merleau-Ponty’s Modification of Phenomenology: Cognition, Passion and Philosophy,” Synthese 118, no. 1 (1999): 49-68. 32 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, xiv. 33 Susan Bordo, “The Cartesian Masculinization of Thought,” Signs 11: 3 (1986): 439-56, 452. One problem with Bordo’s interpretation is the way she generalizes Descartes’ epistemological worries to concern his entire philosophy. Thus she claims, among other things, that according to Descartes “[t]hat which cannot be categorized cleanly deserves no place in the universe.” Bordo, The Flight to Objectivity, 77. Such claims reduce Descartes’ universe to his epistemology and overlook the main part of his other writings, most importantly his writings on the passions. In The Passions of the Soul, the last work Descartes published during his lifetime, he emphasizes, not only the utility, but also the pleasure the passions provide. The last article in the Passions reads “It is on the passions alone that all the good and evil of this life depends,” CSM I, 404. In a letter to Elisabeth Descartes criticizes the Stoic Zeno, who made virtue “so inimical to pleasure” that “only depressed people ... could be counted among his adherents,” CSMK, 261. Considering passages like these and Descartes’ corpus as a whole, it is evident that the senses as well as pleasure belongs to the Cartesian universe, if not to Cartesian epistemology. I want to point out this broader scope of Cartesian philosophy, but will continue my discussion of Bordo’s critique in the realm of Cartesian epistemology, where it is situated. 34. Among feminist philosophers at least Margaret Atherton and Amy Schmitter have criticized the strict distinction between reason and the senses which Bordo reads into Descartes’ philosophy. See Atherton, “Cartesian Reason and Gendered Reason,” and Amy Morgan Schmitter, “The Passionate Intellect: On the Non-Opposition of Intellect and Emotion in Descartes” (Paper at the central Division of the American Philosophical Association, 1996). 35 CSM I, 204. 36 See Descartes’ example of a piece of wax, CSM II, 20-1. For a detailed account of Descartes’ notion of sense-experience and Merleau-Ponty’s critical interpretation of this notion, see Sara Heinämaa, “The Living Body and Its Position in Metaphysics: MerleauPonty’s Dialogue with Descartes,” in Metaphysics, Facticity, Interpretation: Phenomenology in the Nordic Countries, ed. Dan Zahavi, Sara Heinämaa and Hans Ruin (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003), and Sara Heinämaa, “The Soul-Body Union and Its Sexuality: From Descartes to Merleau-Ponty and Beauvoir,” in this volume. Heinämaa’s conclusions about the essence of the problematic are partly different from mine. 37 See e.g. Bordo, The Flight to Objectivity, 34-5. 38 See Principles, CSM I, 208-9. 39 CSM I, 45. 40 Ibid., 39. 41 When Descartes, later in his philosophical career, doubts in order to find a metaphysical foundation, it is exactly the material simple natures of the Rules and the universal science they found that is doubted. After doubt has served its function and Descartes has shown the existence of a veracious God and material things, material simple natures re-enter as innate geometrical ideas, by which we can understand the essential features of material things. See CSM II, 50-1, and Jean-Luc Marion, Cartesian Questions: Method and Metaphysics, trans.

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John Cottingham, Stephen Voss and Jeffrey L. Kosky (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999, first published in French 1991), 57-9. 42 See The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vol. III, ed. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch and Anthony Kenny (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, hereafter cited as CSMK), 227. 43 Bordo, The Flight to Objectivity, 90. Descartes claims his ability to “think without the body” in a letter dated April or May 1638 to the French philosopher Reneri for distribution to the French soldier and courtier Alphonse Pollot. See CSMK, 99. 44 For an account of the role Descartes gives embodiment in scientific activity, see Amélie Oxenberg Rorty, “Descartes on Thinking with the Body,” in The Cambridge Companion to Descartes, ed. John Cottingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 45 CSMII, 57. 46 Bordo, The Flight to Objectivity, 76. This claim is repeated throughout her study. She characterizes Cartesian philosophy by writing, “[c]ertainly, Cartesianism is nothing if not a passion for separation, purification, and demarcation,” ibid., 17. Bordo’s concept of purity is based on a distinction between a pure realm and a contaminated “outside”. The concept is derived from studies on the anthropology of religion, especially from the work of Mary Douglas, who studies the cultural tendency to project everything impure and evil onto a substance or group, which is then excluded in order to protect the purity of society, ibid., 812. Bordo’s use of anthropological theory belongs to the cultural part of her psychocultural framework. 47 Ibid., 81. Bordo is right in pointing out that Descartes enters a development of thought that will ultimately, through the development of scientific and political thought, replace God with the human intellect. But she overlooks the fact that to some essential points Descartes had not himself overcome God. Bordo misrepresents Descartes’ philosophy by misregarding the essential role God, especially as an idea of a positive infinite, plays in his thought. For an interesting account of the relation between seventeenth century and later scientific rationalism, see Merleau-Ponty, “Everywhere and Nowhere,” 147-52. 48 Ibid., 108. 49 Ibid., 61; cf. ibid., 55. 50 Bordo, The Flight to Objectivity, 80. 51 Descartes describes the relation between the perfections of the intellect and the will in article 35. of the Principles of Philosophy. He writes that “the perception of the intellect extends only to the few objects presented to it, and is always extremely limited. The will, on the other hand, can in a certain sense be called infinite, since we observe without exception that its scope extends to anything that can possibly be an object of any other will – even the immeasurable will of God. So it is easy for us to extend our will beyond what we clearly perceive; and when we do this it is no wonder that we may happen to go wrong,” CSM I, 204-205. Descartes’ description gives the impression of a situated intellect with a by necessity limited perspective – a conception many feminist philosophers have presented as an alternative to the “universalist” knower of Early Modern philosophy. 52 CSM II, 31. Descartes’ proofs of the existence of God are usually divided into a posteriori and a priori proofs. The a posteriori proof, which Descartes usually presents first, is based on God’s infinity. Descartes can, from his own existence as a thinking substance, deduce the idea of a finite substance, but he recognizes that he also has “the idea that gives me my understanding of a supreme God, eternal, infinite, omniscient, omnipotent and creator of all things that exist apart from him.” He cannot himself be the origin of this idea, Because it “certainly has in it more objective reality than the ideas that represent finite substances,” ibid., 28. Descartes point is that the reality of his idea of an infinite God cannot be caused by himself as a finite thinking being, but has to have its origin in some actual or formal reality outside his finite thought. Descartes’ a priori proof of the existence of God is based on a conceptual analysis of his perfection. Since Descartes finds in himself the idea of God as a


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supremely perfect being, and existence necessarily belongs to perfection, God must exist, ibid., 45-46. For a sympathetic reading illuminating the philosophical aspects of Descartes’ proofs of the existence of God, with special emphasis on the idea of infinity, see Marion, Cartesian Questions. Marion puts special emphasis on the incomprehensibility of the infinite. God’s existence is shown by my incapability to comprehend him, ibid., 39-40. 53 CSM II, 58. 54 Bordo, The Flight to Objectivity, 5. Bordo does not deny that there is strong textual evidence that shows that Descartes’ doubt had a methodological task (in contrast to Phyrrean scepticism), or that Descartes’ doubt was a result of a voluntary decision, but she claims that he gets caught in the deep psychological undercurrents of his doubt. Bordo writes that “even if Cartesian doubt were voluntarily produced, deliberately ‘put on’ to cleanse the mind of its habitual proclivities, this does not rule out the experiential authenticity of Cartesianism,” ibid., 16. 55 Ibid., 16. 56 CSM II, 324. 57 Bordo, The Flight to Objectivity, 17 and 82. 58 Anthony Kenny, Descartes: A Study of his Philosophy (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1993, first published 1968), 19. 59 Bordo, The Flight to Objectivity, 17. 60 See CSM II, 12-5. 61 Descartes defines truth as clear and distinct. In the Principles he writes that “we will never mistake the false for the true provided we give our assent only to what we clearly and distinctly perceive,” CSM I, 207. 62 Bordo , The Flight to Objectivity, 17. 63 Bordo writes that the “contamination” in question is “purely psychological, of course—it is the mind’s confidence in its own discriminative capacities that has been infected. What is at stake is not the trustworthiness of particular beliefs but that of our cognitive capacities themselves,” ibid., 17. This passage shows how unproblematically Bordo identifies any discussion of cognitive capacities with the realm of the psychological. There is no distinction between epistemology and psychology. 64 Bordo uses concepts and categories drawn from cognitive development theory and the psychoanalytic literature on separation and anxiety. The cognitive psychologist Jean Piaget and the psychoanalysts Melanie Klein and Margaret Mahler are her main sources. It is important to note that this psycho-theoretical point of reference is based on different interpretations of Freudian psychoanalysis than the structuralist psychoanalysis developed by Jacques Lacan and contemporary French theorists such as Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray, whose analyses of femininity and masculinity cannot directly be compared to Bordo’s claim about a “masculinization of thought”. 65 Bordo, The Flight to Objectivity, 7. Bordo points out that we cannot apply the object relations theory developed by Nancy Chodorow, explaining male detached and female attached identities by the pre-oedipal development of girls and boys cared for by predominantly female caretakers, to cultures where child-rearing practices differ radically from ours. Bordo strongly emphasizes that her analysis of Cartesian masculinization shall not be read as Chodorowian. See also Susan Bordo (ed.), Feminist Interpretations of René Descartes (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 48. 66 Ibid., 6-7. Chodorow claims that boys, during their early interaction with their mother, who is usually the primary caring parent, “come to define themselves as more separate and distinct, with a greater sense of rigid ego boundaries and differentiation.” Girls, who are mothered by a person of the same sex, do not separate themselves to the same degree as boys, and they come to experience and define themselves as continuous with others. Chodorow draws the conclusion that the “basic feminine sense of self is connected to the

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world,” while “the basic masculine sense of self is separate,” Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 169. 67 Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 79. For a rare feminist critique of Fox Keller’s use of psychological theory, see Helen Longino, “Subjects, Power and Knowledge: Description and Prescription in Feminist Philosophies of Science,” in Feminist Epistemologies, ed. Linda Alcoff and Elisabeth Potter (New York: Routledge, 1993). 68 Bordo, The Flight to Objectivity, 104. Bordo’s stance on whether it is legitimate to speak of a “masculine cognitive style” seems to be inconsistent. In her introduction she emphasizes that she does not use this kind of “gender difference” terminology, but at the end of her book, when she argues for a “Cartesian masculinization of thought”, she strengthens her claim by comparing her analysis with Fox Keller’s more directly Chodorowian studies of a male cognitive style and points to similarities in their conclusions, ibid., 103-5. Bordo approvingly quotes Fox Keller’s description of masculinity as connoting autonomy, separation and distance—a description which is directly based on Chodorow’s object relations theory. I try to give Bordo a generous reading and take seriously her claim that her use of “masculinization” is not based on an analogy with developmental theory. 69 Susan Bordo, “The Cartesian Masculinization of Thought,” in Feminist Interpretations of René Descartes, 50. Cf. Bordo, The Flight to Objectivity, 7, where the otherwise same sentence refers to a psychological birth. By changing psychological into psychocultural, Bordo apparently wants to emphasizes that she is not psychologizing philosophical theory, but rather using some psychological concepts in order to situate philosophy in its cultural context. In the introduction to the volume Feminist Interpretations of René Descartes, Bordo emphasizes that she and some other contributors use the concepts “masculinity” and “femininity” as “culturally coded qualities (rather than sexually differentiated groups of people) and [these writers] should not be understood as making empirical generalizations about how men and women think,” Bordo, Feminist Interpretations of René Descartes, 9. 70 Bordo, The Flight to Objectivity, 9. 71 Ibid., 4. 72 Ibid., 58. Bordo quotes Margaret Mahler’s “On the First Three Subphases of the Separation-Individuation Process” in International Journal of Psychoanalysis 53 (1972). 73 Ibid., 58. 74 Ibid., 8. 75 Post-structuralism is here understood in a broad sense and, as in the work of Richard Rorty, combined with claims and premises taken from the pragmatist tradition. See for example ibid., 4-5 and 114-7; and, Susan Bordo and Mario Moussa, “Rehabilitating the ‘I’,” in Feminist Interpretations of René Descartes. 76 Descartes’ early biographer Adrien Baillet had access to the now lost diary and we know the content of these dreams through his testimony. Baillet’s account is reprinted in Oeuvres de Descartes, vol. X, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery (Paris: Libraire Philosophic J. Vrin, 1996, first published 1908), 179-88. For a discussion of biographical and textual matters concerning the dreams and the later fate of Descartes’ manuscript account, see Geneviève Rodis-Lewis, Descartes: Biographie (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1995), 61-71. 77 Bordo, The Flight to Objectivity, 1 and 18. 78 Marion, Cartesian Questions, 2. 79 Michèle Le Doeuff makes a corresponding claim when defining her method of textual analysis against a broadly psychoanalytic interpretation of symbols and emphasizing the importance to interpret imagery in relation to the philosophical problematic of a text. See Le Doeuff, The Philosophical Imagery, 5. 80 Bordo, The Flight to Objectivity, 2. Bordo’s inclusion of deconstruction as one attempt to “objectify philosophy”, as one attempt to naturalize philosophy, together with historization and psychoanalysis, is problematic. She follows Richard Rorty, who conceptualizes “the


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common message of Wittgenstein, Dewey, and Heidegger [as] a historicist one,” (Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 9) and fuses deconstructive and pragmatist elements, but makes the project more explicitly naturalistic than Rorty himself. The problem is that this fusion misrepresents the deconstructive, Heideggerian as well as Derridaean project: to deconstruct a philosophical text is not to explain it by nonphilosophical causes, but to let the text unveil its own limits. 81 Bordo, The Flight to Objectivity, 4. 82 Merleau-Ponty, “Everywhere and Nowhere,” 128. I develop a more detailed discussion of Merleau-Ponty’s reflections on the history of philosophy in Martina Reuter, “Tensions and Continuity: Merleau-Ponty on the History of Philosophy” (Paper at the Nordic Society of Phenomenology Meeting, University of Helsinki April 2003). 83 Ibid., 129-30. 84 Ibid., 130. 85 Ibid., 131-2. 86 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Indirect Language,” in The Prose of the World, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. John O’Neill (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 92. 87 Husserl, Crisis, 74. Sara Heinämaa has explicated Husserl’s interpretation of this duality in Descartes’ thought. See Heinämaa, “From Decisions to Passions.” 88 It is important to note that Merleau-Ponty follows a French tradition of Cartesian studies. In this tradition Descartes’ writings on the passions and the compositum, the human compound or mind and body, have always received much more attention than in the AngloSaxon tradition. As a classical example of the French tradition, see Martial Gueroult, Descartes’ Philosophy Interpreted According to the Order of Reasons. Volume II: The Soul and the Body, trans. from the French by Roger Ariew (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985, first published 1952). 89 See Sara Heinämaa’s article in this volume for an interesting and careful interpretation of the continuity between Cartesian philosophy and phenomenology, including MerleauPonty’s reading of Descartes. Her argument contains one point where our interpretations clearly differ. Phenomenology is, as is well showed by Heinämaa, concerned with finding apodicticity, certainty beyond doubt, in our experience of the world, but I do not think that Merleau-Ponty adopts Descartes’ notion of certainty to the extent, which Heinämaa’s argument implies. Heinämaa explicates very well what Merleau-Ponty finds problematic in Descartes’ notion of sense-experience, but I do not think that it follows from this critique that Merleau-Ponty does not also question Descartes’ requirement that an idea has to be distinct, ”so sharply separated from all other perceptions that it contains within itself only what is clear” (CSM I, 208), in order to be certain beyond doubt. Rather than claim that Merleau-Ponty adopts Descartes’ notion of clear and distinct ideas as a definition of apodictic certainty, I would claim that Merleau-Ponty conceives the Cartesian notion of a clear idea, ”present and accessible to the attentive mind” (CSM I, 207), as a sufficient criteria for certainty beyond doubt. This would be my interpretation of Merleau-Ponty’s ”Cartesian” example about pain in an amputated limb, which Heinämaa refers to. When Merleau-Ponty writes that, contrary to what Descartes claims, when I am certain I have sensed, “the certainty of some external thing is involved in the very way in which the sensation is articulated and unfolded before me: it is a pain in the leg” (Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 376), I read him as claiming that the aspect of being clear, present and accessible to the attentive mind, is sufficient to make an experience certain. This means that the passions, which are clear, but usually not distinct, contain enough certainty to serve as the foundation for first philosophy. I think that Heinämaa is right when she points out that Simone de Beauvoir’s phenomenology of sexual difference is built on Cartesian principles, but I would not call these principles epistemological premises. I also think that Beauvoir’s phenomenological descriptions, beautifully captured by Heinämaa, aims at being

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apodictic, but I do not think they aim at being in Descartes’ sense distinct. They do not present experiences sharply separated from other experiences. 90 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 199. Descartes recognizes the irreducible nature of the compositum in a letter to Elisabeth, written June 28th 1643, see CSMK, 227. 91 I discuss this aspect of Cartesianism at greater length in Martina Reuter, “Descartes on the Body, Sexual Difference, and the Passions,” in Bios, Eros and Thanatos in Ancient and Early Modern Philosophy, ed. Vigdis Songe-Moller and Vibeke A. Tellmann (University of Bergen: Centre for Women’s and Gender Research, Volume No. 13, 2002). 92 Letter to Descartes May 24th 1645, in John J. Blom, Descartes: His Moral Philosophy and Psychology (Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1978), 121.

REFERENCES Alanen, Lilli. “Descartes’s dualism and the philosophy of mind.” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale. No 3 (1989): 391-413. Alanen, Lilli.. “Cartesian Ideas and Intentionality.” In Language, Knowledge and Intentionality: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Jaakko Hintikka, edited by Leila Haaparanta, Martin Kush and Ilkka Niiniluoto. Helsinki: Acta Philosophica Fennica, vol. 49, 1990. Alanen, Lilli. Descartes’s Concept of Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. Atherton, Margaret. “Cartesian Reason and Gendered Reason.” In A Mind of One’s Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity, edited by Louise M. Anthony and Charlotte Witt. Boulder and Oxford: Westview Press, 1993. Bordo, Susan 1986: “The Cartesian Masculinisation of Thought.” Signs 11, no. 3 (1986): 439-456. Bordo, Susan. The Flight to Objectivity: Essays on Cartesianism and Culture. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987. Bordo, Susan, ed. Feminist Interpretations of René Descartes. University Park, Penn.: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999. Bordo, Susan and Mario Moussa. “Rehabilitating the ‘I’.” In Feminist Interpretations of René Descartes, edited by Susan Bordo. University Park, Penn.: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999. Brentano, Franz. Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, translated from the German by D. B. Terrell, Antos C. Rancurello and Linda L. McAlister, first published 1874. London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973. Chodorow, Nancy. The Reproduction of Mothering. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978. Cole, Eve Browning. Philosophy and Feminist Criticism: An Introduction. New York: Paragon House, 1993. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1991. Le Doeuff, Michèle. The Philosophical Imaginary, translated from the French by Colin Gordon, first published 1980. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989. Le Doeuff, Michèle. Hipparchia’s Choice: An Essay Concerning Women, Philosophy, etc. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Flax, Jane. “Political Philosophy and the Patriarchal Unconscious: A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Epistemology and Metaphysics.” In Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science, edited by Sandra Harding and Merrill B. Hintikka. Dordrecht: D. Reidell Publishing Company, 1983.


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Gueroult, Martial. Descartes’ Philosophy Interpreted According to the Order of Reasons. Volume II: The Soul and the Body, translated from the French by Roger Ariew, first published 1952. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985. Haaparanta, Leila. “The Model of Geometry in Logic and Phenomenology.” Philosophia Scientiae 1, no. 2 (1996): 2-14. Heidegger, Martin. „Edmund Husserls Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins. In Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins, edited by Martin Heidegger, first published 1928. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1980. Heidegger, Martin. History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, translated from the German by T. Kisel, first published 1979. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. Heinämaa, Sara. “Merleau-Ponty’s Modification of Phenomenology: Cognition, Passion and Philosophy.” Synthese 118, no. 1 (1999): 49-68. Heinämaa, Sara. ”From Decisions to Passions: Merleau-Ponty’s Interpretation of Husserl’s Reduction.” In Merleau-Ponty’s Reading of Husserl, edited by Lester Embree and Ted Toadvine. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2002. Heinämaa, Sara. ”The living Body and Its Position in Metaphysics: Merleau-Ponty’s Dialogue with Descartes.” In Metaphysics, Facticity, Interpretation: Phenomenology in the Nordic Countries, edited by Dan Zahavi, Sara Heinämaa and Hans Ruin. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2003. Heinämaa, Sara. ”The Soul-Body Union and Its Sexuality: From Descartes to Merleau-Ponty and Descartes.” In this volume. Himanka, Juha. “Reduction In Concreto: Two Readings of the Idea of Phenomenology.” Recherches Husserliennes 11 (1999): 51-78. Husserl, Edmund. Phenomenology as Rigorous Science. In Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, translated from the German by Quentin Lauer, first published 1911. New York: Harper and Row, 1965. Husserl, Edmund. Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, translated from the German by W. R. Boyce Gibson, first published 1913. London: Collier Macmillan, 1962. Husserl, Edmund. The Idea of Phenomenology, translated from the German by William P. Alston and George Nakhnikian, first published 1950. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973. Husserl, Edmund. Cartesian Meditations, translated from the German by Dorion Cairns, first published 1950. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1988. Husserl, Edmund. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, translated from the German by David Carr, first published 1954. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1989. Irigaray, Luce. Speculum of the Other Woman, translated from the French by Gillian C. Gill, first published 1974. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986. Judovitz, Dalia. Subjectivity and Representation in Descartes: The Origins of Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Judovitz, Dalia. The Culture of the Body: Genealogies of Modernity. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2001. Keller, Evelyn Fox. Reflections on Gender and Science. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985. Kenny, Anthony. Descartes: A Study of his Philosophy. First published 1968. Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1993. Lloyd, Genevieve. The Man of Reason: ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ in Western Philosophy. First published 1984. London: Routledge, 1993. Lloyd, Genevieve. “Maleness, Metaphor, and the ‘Crisis’ of Reason.” In A Mind of One’s Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity, edited by Louise M. Anthony and Charlotte Witt. Boulder and Oxford: Westview Press, 1993.

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Longino, Helen. “Subjects, Power and Knowledge: Description and Prescription in Feminist Philosophies of Science.” In Feminist Epistemologies, edited by Linda Alcoff and Elisabeth Potter. New York: Routledge, 1993. Marion, Jean-Luc. Cartesian Questions: Method and Metaphysics, translated from the French by John Cottingham, Stephen Voss and Jeffrey L. Kosky, first published 1991. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception, translated from the French by Colin Smith, first published 1945. New York: Routledge, 1992. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “Phenomenology and the Sciences of Man,” first published 1953. In The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philsophy of Art, History and Politics, edited by James M. Edie. Evanston: Nortwestern University Press, 1964. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Signs, translated by Richard McCleary, first published 1960. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Prose of the World, edited by Claude Lefort and translated by John O’Neill. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973. Reuter, Martina. “Descartes on the Body, Sexual Difference, and the Passions.” In Bios, Eros and Thanatos in Ancient and Early Modern Philosophy, edited by Vigdis Songe-Moller and Vibeke A. Tellmann. University of Bergen: Centre for Women’s and Gender Research, Volume No. 13, 2002. Reuter, Martina. “Tensions and Continuity: Merleau-Ponty on the History of Philosophy.” Paper at the Nordic Society of Phenomenology Meeting, University of Helsinki April 2003. Rodis-Lewis, Geneviève. Descartes: Biographie. Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1995. Rorty, Amélie Oxenberg. “Descartes on thinking with the body.” In The Cambridge Companion to Descartes, edited by John Cottingham. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Rorty, Richard. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980. Ryle, Gilbert. The Concept of Mind. London: Hutchinson’s University Library, 1949. Schmitter, Amy Morgan. “The Passionate Intellect: On the Non-Opposition of Intellect and Emotion in Descartes.” Paper at the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association 1996. Scheman, Naomi. “Though This Be Method, Yet There Is Madness in It: Paranoia and Liberal Epistemology.” In A Mind of One’s Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity, edited by Louise M. Anthony and Charlotte Witt. Boulder and Oxford: Westview Press, 1993.

FEMINIST RATIONALITY DEBATES REREADING KANT

Robin May Schott (University of Copenhagen, Denmark)

1. INTRODUCTION Feminist work in the history of philosophy was one of the first fields for the burgeoning new work of feminist philosophy in the early 1970’s. After all, it was indisputable that the philosophers who made up the core canon in Western history of philosophy were almost without exception men who had made reprehensible comments on women. One could open a text of Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, or Kant and find one’s feminist proclivities confirmed: philosophers had been sexist. Given Kant’s explicit endorsement of the subordination of wives to their husbands and the exclusion of women from intellectual and political rights, it is no surprise that many feminists consider Kant to be an exemplar of philosophical sexism. In fact, Barbara Herman notes that Kant is the modern moral philosopher that feminists find most objectionable.1 For example, one can read Kant’s assertion that woman’s character, in contrast to man’s, is wholly defined by natural needs and thus woman intrinsically lacks self-determination. He writes, “Nature was concerned about the preservation of the embryo and implanted fear into the woman’s character, a fear of physical injury and a timidity towards similar dangers. On the basis of this weakness, the woman legitimately asks for masculine protection.”2 Because of their natural fear and timidity, women are also viewed as unsuited for scholarly work. Kant mockingly describes the scholarly women who “use their books somewhat like a watch, that is, they wear the watch so it can be noticed that they have one, although it is usually broken or does not show the correct time.3 Kant’s remarks on women in the Anthropology echo his sentiments in Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime. In that early 101 L. Alanen and C. Witt (eds.), Feminist Reflections on the History of Philosophy, 101-115. © 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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work, Kant notes, “A woman who has a head full of Greek, like Mm. Dacier, or carries on fundamental controversies about mechanics, like the Marquise de Châtelet, might as well even have a beard, for perhaps that would express more obviously the mien of profundity for which she strives.”4 In Kant’s view, women’s philosophy is “not to reason, but to sense.” He adds, “I hardly believe that the fair sex is capable of principles.” No wonder that under these conditions the woman “makes no secret in wishing that she might rather be a man, so that she could give larger and freer latitude to her inclinations; no man, however, would want to be a woman.”5 But the banal confirmation of sexism in a philosopher like Kant does not yet raise the philosophical questions: Is this sexism a symptom of a profound philosophical sexism, in which basic concepts such as humanity, reason, objectivity, and autonomy are themselves saturated with the hierarchic asymmetry of sexual dualism? Or are these derogatory views of women symptoms of social prejudices that do not touch the heart of philosophical thinking? In these opposing possibilities can be heard competing conceptions of philosophy, as well as competing conceptions of methodology in reading the history of philosophy. Those who answer affirmatively to the first question, like Elizabeth Grosz, Genevieve Lloyd and Susan Bordo, hold to a conception of philosophical thinking as a social activity. As such, philosophical ideas should be interpreted as dependent on the social and cultural conditions of their production, despite philosophers’ own declamations to the contrary. In this view, philosophical thought is understood as crystallizing historically specific conceptions of human existence. Thus, the context of philosophical works is relevant for specifically philosophical reasons. Michele Le Doeuff articulates this view when she argues that the social context fills out the philosophical imaginary of a text.6 Thus, misogynist comments about women are taken as crucial moments in the philosophical system at hand. Those who answer affirmatively to the second question have an alternative conception of philosophy. They view philosophical systems as relatively autonomous of the social and cultural context of their production. Philosophers naturally give some tell-tale indicators that they belong to a specific historical period, but these indicators can be separated from the genuinely original and significantly philosophical dimensions of a text. Of course, to this position one must ask what criteria does one use to separate out non-integral aspects of a philosophical system (e.g., misogynist comments) from its essential aspects. Here, interpreters rely on what they consider to be standard methodological strategies: e.g., the principle of charity and the principle of consistency. Interpreters view the ideal text as in principle non-contradictory. The more a particular reading can establish textual consistency, the better the reading. It is this view that underlies

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Charlotte Witt’s claim that Aristotle cannot both be consistent and have gender inequalities as fundamental to his system. Note that in establishing the ideal text, interpreters tend to remove as the cause of inconsistency that which is implausible in the contemporary world. Feminist philosophers who have approached the philosophical canon in this spirit have used it as a positive resource for developing ideas of contemporary feminist concern.7 These methodological commitments differ significantly from those shared by the first group of interpreters. Those theorists views inconsistencies and paradoxes in a text to be clues to its central logic, not as inessential or marginal comments. Two methodologies for reading the history of philosophy draw specifically on the notion of contradiction: Marxist-inspired readings and deconstructionist readings. Marxist and critical theorists have highlighted the concept of ideology-critique to show how contradictions in philosophical thought are indicators of contradictions in the social world—e.g., between the dominant ideals of equality and the constitutive structures of inequality. From the point of view of deconstructionist readings, contradictions in a text are essential for maintaining the logic of its argument. In other words, only through the instabilities in the text, through the contradictory versions of woman as both irrational and rational, can the text sustain the alignment of reason and masculinity.8 Therefore, what is essential in understanding feminist work in the history of philosophy is not so much the question of whether canonical texts should be read in a negative or positive mode, but rather what methodological presuppositions are at work about the nature of the text and the appropriate strategies for reading. Only on the basis of a methodological debate can one consider which readings are most productive for feminist interpretations, and how these strategies deepen philosophical reflection in the history of philosophy.9 Much feminist scholarship on Kant is inspired by contemporary feminist concerns—e.g., the concern to think through issues of community, intersubjectivity, and bodily feeling.10 As Charlotte Witt notes, “In this regard, feminist philosophers are doing exactly what other philosophical movements have done, namely to engage in a project of historical selfjustification through a selective interpretation of the philosophical canon.”11 Although there has been a significant feminist production in the areas of Kantian ethics and aesthetics, the arena for discussing Kant’s treatment of knowledge and reason has been sparsely populated by feminist theorists. In what follows, I will discuss three different readings of Kant’s theory of cognition and reason by women philosophers. These interpretations illustrate how contemporary concerns become a tool for interpretation, and how the philosophical past is used to undergird values that seem fragile in the present. But most significantly, they illustrate how feminists use

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conceptual resources in a way that is enriching for interpreting the history of philosophy.

2. INTERPRETATIONS OF KANT’S THEORY OF COGNITION AND REASON In what follows I present some of the key points of my own reading of Kant, in Cognition and Eros; A Critique of the Kantian Paradigm (1988), that of Adrian M. S. Piper, in her article, “Xenophobia and Kantian Rationalism”, (1992-3) and that of Susan Neiman, in her book The Unity of Reason (1994). I return to my book as one example of a feminist response to the question of Kantian rationality, but not as an argument for my present views on all of these issues. My thesis in the book is that Kant’s philosophy illustrates an ascetic posture in philosophy, which denigrates feeling, sensuality, and the feminine, and which distances them from the realm of the rational. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant writes, there are “two stems of human knowledge, namely, sensibility and understanding....Through the former, objects are given to us; through the latter, they are thought.”(A15/B29)12 Even though Kant recognizes that empirical receptivity includes both sense experience and feeling (e.g., the subjective feeling of pleasure and pain), he adamantly rejects the latter as a component of knowledge. In the Critique he notes that “feeling is not a faculty whereby we represent things, but lies outside our whole faculty of knowledge” (A802/B830) Thus, sensibility as a faculty of knowledge is only a restricted portion of our sensible apparatus. The cognitive portion of sensibility is identified by Kant with intuition, defined as that through which knowledge is in immediate relation to objects. (A19/B33) But intuition is not immediate in an experiential sense, only in an analytic sense. Intuition is a result of Kant’s isolating sensibility from all other components of knowledge. By this process of reducing the scope of sensibility, Kant implies that Anschauung (looking at or viewing) is paradigmatic for knowledge. Thus, vision becomes the primary form of sensibility. Kant writes: “Not only does sight have the greatest radius of perception in space, but it also receives its sense organ as being least involved...”13 Kant insists on excluding awareness of our own sensory involvement from knowledge of the object: “when the sensation...becomes stronger than the awareness of the relation to an external object, then outer perceptions are changed into inner perceptions.”14 As far as the other senses are concerned, Kant considers touch as only contributing to knowledge of the formal properties of an object, and he considers taste and smell as being completely non-

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cognitive. Kant thereby limits the sensory component of knowledge, and he also explicitly excludes feeling from cognition. As a corollary to his treatment of sensibility and feeling, he compares emotions and passions to “an illness of mind because both emotion and passion, exclude the sovereignty of reason.”16 Kant’s ascetic posture is manifest in his analysis of objective knowledge as well. One of the most historically significant contributions of Kant is his recognition that human activity is essential to knowledge. Contrary to Hume, Kant understood that “Reason has insight only into that which it produces after a plan of its own” (Bxiii) The understanding does not create the world insofar as the existence of objects is concerned, but it does determine objects to the degree that they can be known by us. (A93/B1256) Human understanding does not create the sensuous content of the phenomenal world, but it unites the representations into an object through the transcendental unity of apperception: “It must be possible for the ‘I think’ to accompany all my representations, for otherwise...the representation would be impossible, or at least would be nothing to me.” ( B131) In this analysis, disparate representations are essentially unrelated to each other, and the self-consciousness which is the source of unity in the object is indifferent to the content of these representations. The “I think” does not develop or change through the act of unifying impressions. The “I think” is “allgemein” and refers to the universal feature of consciousness, in contrast to empirical consciousness which is “as many-colored and diverse a self as I have representations of which I am conscious to myself” (B134) The formal abstractness of apperception also characterizes the categories of the understanding that exist prior to and independent of experience. The categories which make knowledge possible are independent of the sensible content of experience, and thus impervious to any historical changes in subjects or objects. And although the categories embody for Kant the “spontaneity” of human activity, this spontaneity takes the form of unalterable “rules” (B145) to which individuals’ thought must conform. The sensuous content of objects is itself incapable of providing the grounds for common experience. The reading of Kant that I presented in Cognition and Eros is a critical account of Kant’s cognitive apparatus. It is an account that takes theoretical reason (i.e., reason’s role in scientific knowledge) as paradigmatic for all the tasks of reason, including that of practical reason and aesthetic judgment, which is no longer a view that I would argue for today. My account of theoretical reason focuses particularly on the cognitive relation between knower and the object of knowledge. This reading of Kant was based on three kinds of strategies for reading the history of philosophy: 1) It draws on a dialectical critique of Kant’s formalism, of the split between form and content, of his indifference to the historicity of the mutually

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constitutive relations amongst subjects and objects, of the indifference to the process by which subjects and objects are created in relation to each other and through which subjects can have knowledge of objects—a critique that is found in Hegel and much of post-Kantian continental philosophy. 2) It problematizes the relation between philosophy and the social world in which these ideas were created. As Gadamer notes, philosophy is a reflective appropriation of cultural and historical traditions, and thus is not independent of the context of existence.17 Lucien Goldmann has worked with the concept of class to argue that great creative works express on an imaginative or conceptual plane the self-understanding of a social class or group.18 A correlate of this attempt to situate philosophy amidst social relations is a focus on the ideological dimension of philosophical ideas. In terms of the ideological dimension of Kant’s philosophy, I explored how Kant’s presuppositions about the body, sexuality, and the feminine can be traced in his treatment of knowledge and practical reason. 3) This reading takes philosophy to be an articulation of a mode of existence. Kierkegaard relates the story of the man “who sought to demonstrate his sanity by the repeated proclamation that ‘the world is round’.” Since I was mentored by a teacher who argued that pure theoretical interest is an example of this behavior, Kant’s insistence on a purely theoretical interest in knowledge seems bizarre. If one takes engagement with others as a primary mode of encountering the world, then the disinterested form of looking at the object depicted in Kant’s theory of knowledge “ represents a modification of an original interest.”19 In acknowledging the role of feelings, desires, volitions, and interests in knowledge, the disinterested reason of Kant’s epistemology articulates the perspective of embodied persons who have sought to dis-engage themselves from these “non-rational” factors. Adrian Piper’s reading of Kantian rationality also takes an anchor in contemporary concerns, namely the question of race relations and xenophobia. In her article “Xenophobia and Kantian Rationalism,” Piper concentrates on Kant’s conception of the self and the resources available to the self for knowing other persons. Piper engages Kant’s analysis of the self with the problem of xeno-phobia, which she defines as a resistance to anomaly that typically finds expression in racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, class elitism and homophobia.20 She considers whether a Kantian conception of the self explains xenophobia as a necessary or as a contingent attribute of the self. In her view, Kant’s conception of the self implies the latter, and the Kantian self has resources for revising conceptual presuppositions on the basis of new experience. Piper labels Kant’s view that perception must conform to the fundamental categories of thought that ensure the coherence and unity of the self as the “Kantian rationalism thesis”.21 In order to consciously


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experience something and to be rationally unified subjects, we have to make sense of that experience in terms of a set of coherent concepts that structure it. Piper focuses on the relation between transcendental (pure a priori) and empirical concepts in Kant’s philosophy. In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant asserts that empirical concepts depend on transcendental ones, implying that transcendental concepts make the empirical concepts possible, without ensuring any particular set of them. Thus, transcendental concepts (which have more inclusive properties) are instantiated by empirical concepts (which have less inclusive properties).22 Piper then turns her attention to the cognitive status of the concept of personhood in Kant’s epistemology. She argues that the concept of person for Kant is both a transcendent and a transcendental concept. Whereas transcendental concepts refers to the necessary pre-conditions of experience, transcendent refers to that which exceeds or surpasses the limits of experience. As a transcendent concept, the concept of personhood gives coherence to particular empirical experiences of human behavior by unifying them under a more abstract and inclusive notion that surpasses in scope any particular instance of human behavior that conforms to it. It is by virtue of this concept that we expect other human beings to regularly behave as persons, no matter how frequently this expectation may be violated.23 But as a transcendental concept, the concept of person is what makes our particular empirical experiences of human behavior possible. The decisive question for Piper is: what is it that prevents the recognition of a particular third-person other in the category of personhood (as takes place in xenophobia), and can the self correct for this exclusion of a particular empirical other from the category of personhood? Piper defines xenophobia as a “fear of what is experientially unfamiliar, of individuals who do not conform to one’s empirical assumptions about what other people are like, how they behave, or how they look. Ultimately it is a fear of individuals who violate one’s empirical conception of persons and so one’s self-conception.”24 In other words, xenophobia is a reaction to an anomalous other who transgresses one’s preconceptions and hence the coherence of the self. I may for example identify a particular individual as irrational (and thus not fully deserving the treatment accorded to personhood), if I perceive them as phlegmatic and incapable of taking action, or as impersonal and disassociated from painful realities. The error here consists in equating a particular set of familiar empirical behavior with unified rational agency in general. In Kantian terminology, according to Piper, it would consist in conflating my empirically limited conception of people with the absolute and unconditioned idea of personhood.25 Piper concludes that since a perception need only to conform to transcendental concepts in order to be an object of experience, then Kant’s theory of the self provides for the possibility that a person with an

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empirically limited conception of people need not be a xenophobe. One can still acknowledge that there are other ways to live than the ones with which she is familiar. Not only does Kant’s theory of personhood provide an explanation for individuals’ difficulties when confronted by anomalous experiences, but the transcendent concept of person provides the resources for expanding one’s own partial and limited empirical experiences and thus correcting for xenophobic reactions. Since Kant’s notion of reason implies a search for the “unconditioned”, then reason works interrogatively and we have a motive to enlarge our understanding by searching for further data by which to explain it. Thus, Piper’s strongest formulation is that since Kant’s conception of the rational subject implies that the self is disposed to seek more inclusive explanations, then we can even be said to welcome anomalies as irresistible cognitive challenges. Not only does the Kantian self have the resources for correcting for xenophobia, but it can even be characterized by a kind of xenophilia: “a positive valuation of human difference as intrinsically interesting ... and a disvaluation of conformity to one’s honorific stereotypes as intrinsically uninteresting.”26 Piper’s interpretation of Kant works through questions of concern to contemporary feminists, including concerns about race relations. In contrast to my reading of Kant, Piper views Kantian formalism as a positive instead of a negative resource for philosophy, since it contains the possibility for the subject to be self-correcting and self-developing. Her interpretation expresses a fundamental commitment to ethical questions facing the subject. Piper’s analysis of Kantian rationalism is not based on the question: how is knowledge of objects possible. Rather, she raises to rationality the question more typically posed in ethics: how is recognition of other persons possible? Thus, Piper refuses the split between the cognitive and the ethical spheres that typifies Kantian interpretations as well as work in contemporary epistemology and ethics more generally. Susan Neiman’s book The Unity of Reason also emphasizes the links between reason and ethical and political projects in Kant’s thought. She argues that Kant reconfigured reason beyond the limits of the cognitive. In Neiman’s view, Kant’s critical philosophy fundamentally reconceives the nature of reason by focusing on the unity of theoretical and practical reason. Accordingly, Kantian rationality is not centrally concerned with the cognitive—in contrast to a rationalist conception of philosophy that does identify reason with knowledge. Although reason is intellectual and reflective, its problems can be solved only through practice, not by attaining knowledge. Reason introduces ends, and thereby introduces a motive to question experience. But in evaluating experience in relation to ends, reason necessarily goes beyond what is already given in experience, and hence reason goes beyond the work of understanding. Neiman writes, “The concepts of the understanding give order to experience; the principles of


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reason are the standard by which it is judged. In a conflict between the two, it is not the principles which require revision, but experience which is inadequate to the principles of reason.”27 As the creator of ends, reason is both grounded in experience yet also independent of it. Thus, reason serves as the source of regulative principles for Kant, “which guides the human search to constitute experience without constituting it for us antecedently.”28 Hence it is only the activities of reason (not understanding) that can be genuinely free, because they are based solely on the nature of the subject. Neiman argues that practical reason is primary within the unity of reason, because reason’s role in theoretical matters (traditionally the concern of epistemology) cannot be understood independently of reason’s practical nature. For example, Neiman claims that Kant’s emphasis on the active principle that the subject contributes to experience can only be understood in the context of the struggle between custom and reason in the political realm. Noting that it was Rousseau, not Hume, who instigated the revolution in Kant’s philosophical aims, Neiman writes, “it is only in regard to a project of political emancipation that the nature of that (active) principle receives significance”.29 In contrast to Hume’s acceptance of custom to guide us in political matters, Kant argued that the principles of reason are the primary source of authority from which to make reasonable demands on the world. In fact, Neiman argues that Kant’s conception of reason as that which sets goals and determines the standards by which experience is to be judged is “the first metaphysical foundation for political action.”30 But practical reason cannot be all there is to reason. Neiman argues for a continuity between Kant’s notion of reason and the traditional conception of reason as an instrument of scientific knowledge. Although it is not reason’s task to provide knowledge of the world, reason does provide the regulative principles necessary for understanding to function coherently. Reason thus allows for both our assumption that nature’s order is intelligible and gives meaning to the notion of order itself. Reason provides the idea of the Unconditioned, “the totality of all conditions” and thus it is allowed every assumption needed to make the world intelligible.31 Without this idea, not only would we have no reason to question the world, but we could not even begin to form the concept of questioning. In this notion of the Unconditioned, Neiman suggests that Kant must have been influenced by Lessing’s famous injunction to choose “the ever active urge to find the truth” even if it means that he “should always and forever be going astray.”32 Reason is necessary for the scientific searching even to begin. But in making science rely on the idea of the Unconditioned that can never be fully grasped, Kant implies a radical lack of certainty in the laws of science.33

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Reason plays a role in the moral domain similar to the one it plays in the scientific domain: it defines the ends and ideals which enable us to judge the worth of experience. Neiman argues that Kant’s insistence that the possible is not derived from the actual provides the foundation for the French revolution’s ideas of freedom and equality. In the moral sphere, she writes, “it is precisely reason’s role to deny nature’s claim to be definitive and to assert its authority by providing laws to which experience ought to conform.”34 Neiman interprets Kant’s moral law as making a claim on experience that ought to be realized in the future. It is only by acting freely that we can become free, for in the moral world (unlike the scientific one), reason’s activities can always reach its ends.35 In Neiman’s account, the crucial resource in Kant’s theory of reason is the Unconditioned, which initiates both the process of inquiry and the attempt to realize the ideals of reason. All three of the readings presented here depart from a narrow account of cognition: in my reading I criticized the limits of Kant’s conception of scientific objectivity; Piper worked from within Kant’s epistemological apparatus to tease out its implications for the cognition of persons; and Neiman situated Kant’s cognitive apparatus in the context of the broader notion of reason and the primacy of practical reason. Although Neiman does not link her project with feminist concerns (as Piper and I do), she does raise as central themes that are iterated elsewhere by feminist philosophers: the focus on the process of inquiry itself; the notion of limit, of the incompleteness of knowledge, and the consequent problem of radical uncertainty; the primacy of emancipatory ethical and political ideals; an emphasis on the public, communal nature of thought; and a recognition of the imperative to take the viewpoints of others into account.36

3. KANTIAN RATIONALITY DEBATES AND FEMINIST EPISTEMOLOGIES How do these readings in the history of philosophy intersect with contemporary debates in feminist epistemologies? In their anthology Feminist Epistemologies, Linda Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter summarize some of the questions that are key to feminist revaluations of epistemology: “Who is the subject of knowledge? How does the social position of the subject affect the production of knowledge? What is the impact upon knowledge and reason of the subject’s sexed body? Is all knowledge expressible in propositional form? How can objectivity be maximized if we recognize that perspective cannot be eliminated? Are the perspectives of the oppressed epistemologically privileged? How do social categories such as gender affect scientists’ theoretical decisions? What is the role of the social


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sciences in the naturalization of epistemology? What is the connection between knowledge and politics?”37 These three readings of Kant propose different answers to some of these questions. 1) In my interpretation, the Kantian subject of knowledge is a masculine subject who has distanced himself from the erotic dimension of existence. In Piper’s reading, the Kantian subject can be either masculine or feminine, white or black, but is one who has the rational resources to enable her/himself to integrate new and anomalous experiences and thus actualize their capacity for self-transformation. Neiman does not situate the subject in relation to empirical features of existence. For her, the Kantian subject is fundamentally a practical subject, who is motivated by concerns to realize moral and political ideals of freedom. 2) In my reading of Kant, I argue explicitly that the social position of the subject does effect the production of knowledge, and I analyze the significance of gender and class in Kant’s theory of knowledge. Piper’s reading acknowledges the significance of these factors in empirical experiences of selfhood, but argues that the limitations generated by gender, class, and race positions can be revised on the basis of a Kantian notion of personhood. For Neiman, the cognitive subject is subordinate to the practical subject in Kant’s philosophy. Nonetheless, she acknowledges that historical events like the French revolution were decisive for Kant’s fundamental insight into the subject’s role in actively constituting experience. 3) My reading explicitly thematizes the sexed body by viewing historical relations between the sexes as framing Kant’s theory of pure cognitive and moral laws. In Piper’s reading, bodies marked by sex and race define the parameters of particular empirical experiences, but do not preclude the expansion of these parameters. Of the three, it is Neiman’s reading that is most clearly distinguished from feminist questions in that it does not consider the significance of sexed bodies. However, one could use her reconstructed notion of the Unconditioned to pose questions about sexed bodies. One could ask, like Irigaray, about the conditions that are the condition for the relations between sexed bodies; one could seek the ends and ideals that would transform actual relations between the sexes according to ideals of possible relations. 4) Finally, all three of these interpretations emphasize the importance of taking the perspectives of multiple others into an account of knowledge or reason. My own reading criticized the formalism of Kant’s cognitive apparatus that precludes an acknowledgement of multiple perspectives. Piper argued, on the other hand, that the abstract concept of person ultimately enables a meeting with an anomalous other who may have a radically different perspective from one’s own. And Neiman’s

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interpretation of Kant follows Arendt and O’Neill in arguing that impartiality is achieved “by taking the viewpoints of others into account, through progressive enlargement of perspective.”38 But Neiman’s interpretation of the Unconditioned also raises a series of questions that are not included in Alcoff’s and Potter’s list, though they are highly relevant to feminist accounts of knowledge and reason: What motivates inquiry and assures the inevitable incompleteness of knowledge? How can reason be viewed as a project of realizing ethical and political goals, instead of treating these ethical and political goals as extrinsic to the interests of reason?

4. CONCLUDING REMARKS These three accounts of Kant illustrate the widely divergent interpretations of texts given by feminist philosophers. In one case (my own) the relation to the canonical figure was primarily negative, whereas in the other two cases it is overridingly positive. But the differences between the authors, at least between myself and Piper, are not so much a difference in our feminist aspirations (our insistence on incorporating questions of gender, class, and race in the compass of philosophical analysis). Rather, the difference lies in the choice of methodological tools used for engaging the history of philosophy. I.e., we have different “mainstream” theories in relation to which our own feminist accounts are “downstream”. My work uses the concepts of critical social theory to analysis the materiality of sexual bodies. Piper’s work with Kant’s epistemology is fundamentally committed to ethical and psychological questions about recognizing anomalies. And Neiman is fundamentally committed to the initial impulse of Enlightenment values in seeking emancipation from unjust authority. In other words, our differences lie not so much in different views about the nature of feminism, but in differences about the nature of philosophy.39 By implication, what distinguishes feminist work in the history of philosophy from non-feminist work in the field is not a distinctive methodology, but the questions and values posed by feminists from within these divergent methodologies.40 But the pluralism of interpretations illustrated here is not a random or arbitrary collection of viewpoints. These writers share an overarching concern to explore ethical and political values as inherent within the concept of reason. In this sense, all of the interpreters eschew the so-called value-neutrality of interpretation, and place as central the issues of freedom from coercive relations and of recognition of the diversity of human identities. It is within this shared frame of reference that these different perspectives contribute to objectivity, using objectivity in Nietzsche’s sense of perspectivism. Nietzsche writes in the Genealogy of Morals: “All seeing


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is essentially perspective, and so is all knowing. The more emotions we allow to speak in a given matter, the more different eyes we can put on in order to view a given spectacle, the more complete will be our conception of it, the greater our ‘objectivity’.”41 From this angle, objectivity in the history of philosophy is not a cumulative project of amassing truths, but instead can be understood as a methodological commitment to recognizing a multiplicity of perspectives. But this multiplicity is not without direction, and feminist work in the history of philosophy maintains an ethical and political commitment to placing emancipation in the heart of philosophical inquiry. Thus, I would even suggest that feminist work in the history of philosophy deserves the name of critical history of philosophy. By “critical” I do not refer to mere criticism, from which I sought to distance myself above. Rather, I use it to refer to a spirit of theoretical and practical resistance, of living the present critically. As the French philosopher Francoise Dasteur says in her reading of Heidegger’s Rectorat address of 1933:“To be in one’s time...is to resist one’s time, to be in one’s time in a critical fashion, out of phase.”42 Feminist historians of philosophy are out of phase with institutionally legitimated readings of canonical texts. And since one cannot be utopian about the present, feminist readings open up places for dissenting views and maverick approaches that revitalize the impulse to philosophical wonder.

NOTES 1 Barbara Herman, “Could It Be Worth Thinking About Kant on Sex and Marriage?” in A Mind of Her Own, ed. Louise Antony and Charotte Witt (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993), 50. 2 Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, translated by Victor Lyle Dowdell, (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois Press, 1978), 219. 3 Ibid., 221. 4 Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime, translated by John T. Goldthwait (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), section 3, 78. Emilie du Châtelet was a noted natural scientist, close friend of Voltaire’s, and elected to the Bologna Academy of Sciences. 5 Anthropology, 222. See my discussion of Kant in Cognition and Eros; A Critique of the Kantian Paradigm (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988; paperback publication: University Park: Penn State Press: 1993), chapter 8. 6 Linda Alcoff, “Philosophy Matters: A Review of Recent Work in Feminist Philosophy”, Signs (University of Chicago Press, 2000, Vol.25, no.3), 844. 7 Charlotte Witt, “How Feminism is Re-writing the Philosophical Canon”, 1996 (on SWIP homepage) 8 Penelope Deutscher, Yielding Gender; Feminism, Deconstruction and the History of Philosophy (London and N.Y.: Routledge, 1997), 165.

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Cynthia Freeland argues that “by becoming reflective about method in the history of philosophy, in debates about its meaning and value for us today, many feminists are making the field more profoundly philosophical than it has been in earlier decades of this century.” In “Feminist and Ideology in Ancient Philosophy”, forthcoming in Apeiron (manuscript, 9). 10 See for example Jane Kneller’s and Marcia Moen’s articles in my anthology, Feminist Interpretations of Immanuel Kant (University Park: Penn State Press, 1997). 11 Witt, 3. 12 References to the Critique of Pure Reason will be by pagination in the A and B editions of the text, where available. 13 Anthropology, par. 19, 43. 14 Idem. 15 Kant writes, “The sense of touch...enables us to discover the form of a solid body....”, Anthropology 17, 41. He characterizes taste and smell as “subjective sense” which contribute more to the idea of enjoyment than to the cognition of an external object. Anthropology, 16, 4. 16 Anthropology, 73, 155. 17 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, translated and edited by David E. Linge, (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976), 28. 18 Lucien Goldmann, The Hidden God: A Study of Tragic Vision in the ‘Pensées’ of Pascal and the Tragedies of Racine, translated by Philip Thody (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964), 17. 19 George Alfred Schrader Jr., “The Status of Value”, manuscript, 12. 20 Adrian M.S. Piper, “Xenophobia and Kantian Rationalism” in Feminist Interpretations of Immanuel Kant, 29. 21 Ibid., 25. 22 Ibid., 30 and 34. 23 Ibid., 36. 24 Ibid., 48. 25 Ibid., 53 and 58. 26 Ibid., 66. 27 Susan Neiman, The Unity of Reason; Rereading Kant (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 6. 28 Idem. 29 Ibid., 37. 30 Ibid., 38. 31 Ibid., 62 and 65. 32 Ibid., 91. 33 Ibid., 57. 34 Ibid., 111. 35 Ibid., 113, 115 and 128. 36 In this Neiman is sympathetic to Arendt’s account of public thought and impartiality, 117 and 139. 37 Elizabeth Potter and Linda Alcoff, Feminist Epistemologies (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), 13. 38 Neiman, 139. 39 Thus, I differ with Witt’s conclusion that the divergences in feminist interpretations of canonical texts “reflect the contested nature of the ‘us’ of contemporary feminism.” (p. 9) These divergences within contemporary feminist debates also typically are linked to different philosophical commitments that extend beyond (and perhaps biographically predate?) feminist reflections on gender. 40 Similarly, in 1987 Sandra Harding argued that feminist work in the social sciences does not contribute a distinctive method of inquiry. What it does contribute, however, is new


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empirical and theoretical resources, a new purpose, and a newly reflexive inquiry which situates the knower’s relation to the subject- matter as itself an issue for research. Sandra Harding, “Introduction: Is there a Feminist Method?”, in Feminism and Methodology, ed. Sandra Harding (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 1-14. 41 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals, translated by Francis Golffing (Garden City: Double day and Co., 1956), 255. 42 Quoted in Penelope Deutscher, introduction to Special Issue of Hypation, French Women Philosophers, forthcoming (manuscript, 15).

REFERENCES Alcoff, Linda and Elizabeth Potter, eds. Feminist Epistemologies. New York and London: Routledge, 1993. Antony, Louise and Charlotte Witt, eds. A Mind of Her Own. Boulder: West-view Press, 1993. Deutscher, Penelope. Yielding Gender; Feminism, Deconstruction and the History of Philosophy. London and New York: Routledge, 1997. Deutscher, Penelope. “Introduction” to Special Issue of Hypatia, French Women Philosophers. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, forthcoming. Freeland, Cynthia. “Feminism and Ideology in Ancient Philosophy”, in Apeiron, forthcoming. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Philosophical Hermeneutics, translated and edited by David E. Linge. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976. Goldmann, Lucien. The Hidden God: A Study of Tragic Vision in the ‘Pensées’ of Pascal and the Tragedies of Racine, translated by Philip Thody. London: Routledge and Kegal Paul, 1964. Harding, Sandra, ed. Feminism and Methodology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. Susan James, interview with Genevieve Lloyd and Moria Gatens, “The Power of Spinoza: Feminist Conjunctions.” In Hypatia, Vol. 15, No. 2. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, Spring 2000. Kant, Immanuel. Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, translated by Victor Lyle Dowdell. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinoois Press, 1978. Kant, Immanuel. Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime, translated by John T. Goldthwait. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960. Neiman, Susan. The Unity of Reason; Rereading Kant. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals, translated by Francis Golffing. Garden City: Doubleday and Co. 1956. Schott, Robin May. Cognition and Eros; A Critique of the Kantian Paradigm. Boston: Beacon Press, 1988. (paperback publication: University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993.) Schott, Robin May, ed. Feminist Interpretations of Immanuel Kant. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997. Schrader, George Alfred Jr. “The Status of Value,” typewritten manuscript. Witt, Charlotte. “How Feminism is Re-Writing the Philosophical Canon.” The Alfred P. Stiernotte Memorial Lecture in Philosophy at Quinnnipiac College, October 2, 1996. Reprinted on SWIP-Web.

FORM, NORMATIVITY AND GENDER IN ARISTOTLE A FEMINIST PERSPECTIVE


For surely it is not likely either that fire or earth or any such element should be the reason why things manifest goodness and beauty both in their being and in their coming to be, or that those thinkers should have supposed it was. (Met. 984b10-14)

Metaphysical and scientific theories are paradigms of objectivity. A metaphysical theory explains the basic constituents and structure of reality, and scientific theories explain the world, and predict its events. And, it is widely assumed that in order to be objective, true to reality or nature, metaphysics and science must be value-free or devoid of normativity. Yet, as feminist theorists, among others, have pointed out, the histories of metaphysics and science are rife with examples of theories that are infused with normative and political dimensions like gender. 1 Normative concepts like gender can appear in the language of a theory, in its assumptions or, more blatantly, in its core concepts. Feminists have argued that gender appears in all these ways in Aristotle’s metaphysical theory of hylomorphism and his scientific theory of reproduction. 2 Most feminist philosophers of science think that the values that appear in theory originate on the subjective side, in the theorizer.3 They are the values of the scientist himself, projected and glorified in the name of science and objectivity. Hence, much feminist attention has been given to debunking the 117 L. Alanen and C. Witt (eds.), Feminist Reflections on the History of Philosophy, 117-136. © 2004 All rights reserved. Printed by Kluwer Academic Publishers ,the Netherlands. Originally published in Cynthia Freeland (ed.) Rereading the Canon: Feminist Interpretations of Aristotle, Perm State Press, 1998.

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image of the disinterested scientist, and in detailing the covert political norms that guide modern scientifc research. Objectivity itself, the preeminent norm of modern scientific practice, is seen by some feminists in psychological terms, as a projection of the self-image of the scientist, or alternatively, by others, as representing the aspirations of a class (bourgeois), gender (male) and historical period (post-Galilean science). 4 Feminist developments of the thesis that objectivity, the cardinal norm of modern science, is androcentric has been varied. Borrowing Sandra Harding’s terminology we can distinguish feminist empiricists, feminist standpoint theorists, and feminist postmodernists. Feminist postmodernists take the moral of the story to be that enlightenment thought, including modern science and its norm of objectivity, are hopelessly implicated in patriarchy, and should be rejected, period. In contrast, both feminist empiricists and standpoint theorists think that feminist criticism will allow for an elimination of androcentric bias in science, and an emergence of genuine objectivity. Paradoxically enough, it is argued that it is precisely because of their explicit political concerns that feminists have been able to decrease distorted research results: Scientific knowledge-seeking is supposed to be value-neutral, objective, dispassionate, disinterested, and so forth. It is supposed to be protected from political interests, goals, and desires (such as feminist ones) by the norms of science. In particular, science’s “method” is supposed to protect the results of research from the social values of researchers. And yet it is obvious to all that many claims which clearly have been generated through research guided by feminist concerns nevertheless appear more plausible (better supported, more reliable, less false, more likely to be confirmed by evidence, etc.) than the beliefs they replace.5

Whether the political dimension of metaphysical or scientific theories renders them entirely suspect, makes them candidates for rehabilitation, or might bring them closer to the truth, is a matter of debate among feminist philosophers of science. What all parties to the debate share in common is the assumption that the values that pervade and shape purportedly valueneutral theory originate on the side of the theorizer.6 Their task has been to show how feminist values, in contrast to masculinist or racist values, can help eliminate bias and achieve a genuinely value-neutral theory (feminist empiricism), or can help develop an enriched notion of objectivity which is compatible with, and indeed requires, the politically correct values of the feminist inquirer (feminist standpoint theory).7 What is never questioned in this debate is the assumption that the norms in a scientific or metaphysical theory originate entirely in the scientist or his culture (race, class etc) and not in nature itself. This is because feminist philosophers of science generally work within the problematic of modern science in which nature is quantitative, devoid of quality and value.8 Given this view of nature, the only available source of norms in a theory is the theorizer. Where else could they come from? However, this view of nature

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is itself historically and culturally locatable; it coincides with the rise of modern science, and is constitutive of the way that science has constructed its ideals of objectivity and value-neutrality. In this paper, I use Aristotle’s theory of hylomorphism to suggest an alternative view according to which nature itself contains norms and values. Perhaps the value-neutrality of the objective scientist, and his disinterested relationship to an inert quantitative nature are all of a piece, and part of the task for feminists is to re-conceive a richer image of the objects of theory to go along with the richer description of the theorizer and their relationship.9 And, if nature itself contains norms and values, then any adequate theory of it must include normative language or concepts quite independently of whatever values the theorist brings to it. This paper traces the complex interaction of political and cultural norms that Aristotle brings to his theory with the norms that he finds in nature itself. While it would be silly, not to mention futile, to recommend a reversal of the scientific revolution, it is neither to suggest that it might be profitable for feminists to be as skeptical of a nature de-valued as they have been of its impartial, disinterested observer.10 In this paper I argue against an interpretation of Aristotle’s metaphysics that conflates objectivity with non-normativity, and then condemns Aristotle for undermining the objectivity of his theories with normative associations and language, and, in particular, gender associations. In its place I propose an interpretation of hylomorphism (Aristotle’s famous theory of matter and form) that emphasizes its inherently normative dimension, and I explain the way in which Aristotle attaches the gender norms of his culture to hylomorphism.11 Hylomorphism is an inherently normative theory of reality because, for Aristotle, nature and reality are infused with value. For Aristotle, then, in order for a theory to be objective, in the sense of true to reality and nature, it must be a normative theory. My paper treats hylomorphism as both a metaphysical thesis concerning the being (ontological make-up) of sensible substances (you, me and the tree) and as principles Aristotle uses to explain events in nature like the generation, formation and functional parts of natural entities (you, me and the tree). Although I have argued elsewhere that Aristotle’s metaphysics and biology are separate projects, there is little doubt that he employs the conceptual triad--matter, form and substance--in both.12 And, since the modern divide between metaphysics and science does not coincide with Aristotle’s distinction between first philosophy and natural philosophy, it would be artificial to limit myself to one or the other in a discussion of contemporary criticism. Further, although most feminist criticism has been directed against the claims of science to be objective and value-neutral, the very same arguments can be made, and have been made, against the claim of metaphysics to be objective and true to reality.13

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On the interpretation I develop, the normativity of nature and reality is constituted by two features of Aristotle’s thought: his functional concept of form and the teleological framework of his metaphysics, which is articulated by the distinction between potential and actual being. I do not develop, therefore, the bizarre view that Aristotle thought that reality or nature was gendered, and that therefore an objective account of it must make reference to gender. Rather, I explain the way in which the normative aspect of a functional definition of form, and the norms inherent in a teleological view of metaphysics, readily lend themselves to more explicit and concrete political coloring e.g. to gender associations. Although Aristotle’s normative metaphysical theory is a framework within which the inegalitarian gender norms of his culture are expressed, his thought offers feminists something far more interesting than an opportunity to deplore that result. Consider, for example, that the question of whether or not (and on what basis) there are values in nature is being debated today by ecologists and ecofeminists.14 Aristotle’s theory provides one important answer to that question, as well as an opportunity to explore the consequences of a normative view of nature. What if, as Aristotle thinks, nature and reality have a normative dimension? What if we cannot divorce scientific and metaphysical issues from questions of value because values and reality are intermingled? These questions suggest interesting possibilities for feminist approaches to the connections among science, metaphysics and values, but they also suggest certain difficulties. Isn’t an inherently normative perspective on metaphysics and science more open to political distortion and oppressive uses than one which tries to maintain a distinction between the world and values? Consider, for example, the way in which the normative idea of what is natural can be used to limit possibilities for women. Moreover, since the kind of normative metaphysics that Aristotle develops is intrinsically hierarchical, isn’t it just the kind of worldview that feminists ought to oppose? In the first section of this paper I discuss the evidence that form and matter in Aristotle’s theory of hylomorphism are gendered notions, and I develop the difficulties that follow for the coherence of hylomorphism given that evidence. I also discuss the standard diagnosis of Aristotle’s mingling of metaphysics and gender, which assumes that hylomorphism is a non-normative theory. In section two, I develop an alternative interpretation of hylomorphism to the one discussed in the first section. I explain how Aristotle’s functional notion of form, and the teleological context of his metaphysics require that form and matter are inherently normative. Given that form, matter and their relationship has a normative dimension, I explain the way in which Aristotle maps gender relations onto them. In the final section I consider Susan Moller Okin’s feminist critique of Aristotle’s


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teleological understanding of nature and his functional understanding of form.15 Okin’s argument is important to consider because she claims that the teleological and functional norms in Aristotle’s theory of nature provide direct theoretical support for the political status quo in Athens, including the inequality of women.16 I then turn to the broader question of what value an Aristotelian approach to the issue of objectivity and norms might have for feminist theory.

1. HYLOMORPHISM AND GENDER Feminist readers of Aristotle have made the case that the notions of form and matter are gendered notions. 17 By a gendered notion I mean a notion that is connected, either overtly or covertly, either explicitly or metaphorically, with gender or sexual difference. Aristotle’s writings, especially his biological and political texts, yield evidence that supports either overt and explicit connections between form and being male, and matter and being female, or covert and metaphorical connections (or both).18 There are two types of evidence. First, there are texts in Aristotle’s biology and natural philosophy that associate form with the male and matter with the female.19 Second, there are texts, primarily in the Politics , that suggest that women’s forms, or the way they have forms, are somehow defective.20 Let us begin by reviewing this evidence. Sexual difference colors form and matter in the biological writings, as in this text which gives Aristotle’s explanation of why there are two sexes: And as the first moving cause, to which belongs the logos and the form, is better and more divine in nature than the matter, it is better also the superior one should be separate from the inferior one. That is why wherever possible and so far as possible the male is separate from the female, since it is something better and more divine in that it is the principle of movement for generated things, while the female serves as their matter. (De Gen. An. 732a210)

Here sexual dimorphism is explained as a means of keeping form away from matter, the better from the worse, where it is clear that form is located in the male and matter in the female. Moreover, the female is virtually identified with matter.21 These associations are enriched and complicated by Aristotle’s statement that women are, not simply, but “as it were” deformed males (Gen. An. 775a15); and by his view that there is something lacking in women’s ability to deliberate, a function concerning which form is the cause or principle. (Politics 1260a8-14) Here, the idea is not that women, or their reproductive organs are matter, but rather that there is something

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wrong with their forms. There is the vague implication that form is really and fully at home in men (in men who are not slaves to be precise), and not in women. In these statements Aristotle conveys that there is something compromised about the forms that women have, or about the way that they have forms. The texts we have just considered provide strong support for the thesis that form and matter are gendered notions; form is somehow male and matter is somehow female.22 Exactly how literal and explicit these gender associations are is a matter of interpretation, but their presence is indisputable. Form and matter are gendered notions, and hence, it might seem, hylomorphism is a gendered, metaphysical theory. This conclusion is puzzling and problematic for the simple reason that according to hylomorphism both men and women are composites of matter and form. If we think of Aristotelian form as male and matter as female in a straightforward sense, then human beings turn out to be hermaphrodites, and not men and women after all. Moreover, given that hylomorphism is a perfectly general theory concerning the structure of all composite substances, whatever intuitive appeal gender associations with matter and form might have in the case of human beings is much weaker in the case of plants and birds, and disappears entirely with houses and brazen spheres. That is, there is a striking tension between Aristotle’s theory of composite substance according to which all human beings (indeed all composite substances) are composites of matter and form, and the texts where sexual difference appears associated with matter and form. If all human beings are metaphysically identical, how can form and matter bear any gender associations? Moreover, a substance’s form is what secures its membership in a species or kind. It is by virtue of its form that we categorize a substance as a human being or a hummingbird. Since male and female human beings are the same species we would expect them to have the same form.23 Given the role of form in securing species identification, it is deeply puzzling that Aristotle indicates quite clearly that men and women differ as to form (without, of course, being at all clear as to what that difference is24), but not in species. If all human beings share the same form, as Aristotle states in the Metaphysics, how can form be differentiated by gender? (1058A 29-b2) If human beings differ in form according to gender, why do they belong to the same kind? The standard diagnosis of these puzzles is that Aristotle allowed his objective, non-normative scientific and metaphysical theory of matter and form to be influenced by the political and social beliefs of his culture. The beliefs can be seen in his remarks about the defective forms of women, even though, strictly and metaphysically speaking, all human forms are equal. Similarly, we can see the influence of his culture in his suggestion that form


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is male and matter female, even though, they can be neither in his descriptive metaphysics. In short, the idea is that the political and social values of Aristotle’s culture have shaped and infiltrated his purportedly descriptive, non-normative theory of hylomorphism. This interpretation of gender in Aristotle’s thought follows the pattern of feminist criticisms of the claim of objectivity of science and metaphysics. It seeks to show that Aristotle’s purportedly value-neutral theories, are infused with Aristotle’s norms, the values and biases of his culture, including especially sexism. It assumes that nature, what Aristotle is theorizing about, is devoid of value and norms. On this interpretation, Aristotle becomes an example, a notorious example, of the way in which the values of the person who writes the books, appears inscribed in them--even when the book is metaphysics or science, the twin pillars of objectivity. One might attempt a reformist interpretation of Aristotle, and argue that his limited scientific methods and tools and his cultural context make the presence of gender bias in his writing virtually inevitable. And one might think further that the removal of gender bias does not change hylomorphism except to rid it of the internal tensions created by Aristotle’s false beliefs about women and men. Or one might take the opposite tack and campaign for the centrality of gender in Aristotle’s theory by pointing out the systematic ways in which putatively metaphysical theories like hylomorphism always carry with them a subtext of gender. Form, matter and hylomorphism just in so far as they purport to frame a general theory of composite substance are necessarily undercut by sexual difference. Far from thinking of the gender associations of hylomorphism as external and eliminable, this approach uses them to point out the inevitable limits of universalism. While purporting to be universal, neutral and objective, the categories of hylomorphism are revealed to be necessarily limited, sexual and normative. I call this the gendered interpretation of hylomorphism. In the next section I propose an alternative approach to Aristotle’s intermingling of hylomorphism and gender, one which places that issue in the broader context of the question of form, matter and normativity. Both the reformist and the gendered interpretation of hylomorphism share a common but mistaken assumption about Aristotle’s notion of form: that form is a scientific or descriptive principle devoid of normativity. The reformist view thinks that form can emerge intact once we cleanse it of its extrinsic gender associations. The gendered approach also thinks that form is purportedly descriptive and non-normative, but adds that it is always subverted by norms like gender. On either interpretation Aristotle’s intended notion of form is descriptive, scientific and non-normative. This shared assumption is mistaken, and I think the issue of hylomorphism and gender can be best understood once we see that, and in what sense, Aristotelian form is inherently normative.

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2. FORM, NORMATIVITY, AND GENDER What do I mean when I say that form is inherently normative? Before answering this question, it will be useful to say more about the alternative, standard interpretation. Many scholars of Aristotle (including, I have just claimed, feminist scholars) have assumed the objective or descriptive character of Aristotelian form. One reason to think of form this way is the role that it plays in classification. The idea that form is a principle of classification makes sense both in the context of Aristotle’s metaphysics of substance,25 and in the taxonomical project of his biological writings.26 And, it is assumed that the answer to the Aristotelian question--what is it?-in the metaphysical or biological context will not rely upon a normative principle. What something is, is a matter of fact or reality not a question of value. Hence, it makes sense from this perspective to think that form is a descriptive, non-normative principle of classification. On my view, Aristotelian form is inherently normative; hence, it is not a purely descriptive scientific principle of classification into kinds or species. Although form is a principle of classification into species, it is a principle that has normative content. However, the kind of normativity that infuses Aristotelian form is not the kind of concrete gender and political associations that feminist critics have pointed out, and that I discussed in the previous section. In saying form is normative I do not mean that it is metaphorically associated with being male, although I do think these associations are in the text. Rather, form is normative because it is a functional concept that operates in the context of a teleological metaphysics. The normativity of form is, as it were, formal. Form would be normative in the sense I develop even if all the political associations, both overt and covert, in the text were removed or never appeared. Let me begin sketching out the case for the normativity of form. One way to see the normative aspect of form is to see that it is a functional notion for Aristotle. Soul, for example, is a principle and cause of an array of life functions; nutrition, reproduction and perception, movement and reasoning. So, form is a principle of species identification as the source of those functions which are characteristic of the species. Form is a functional principle of species identification; what a thing is, for Aristotle, is determined by what it can do (and not, for example, by its morphology or reproductive history). What Aristotle says about the parts of organisms, that they are defined by their functions, is also true of whole organisms: “What a thing is is always determined by its function: a thing really is itself when it can perform its function; an eye, for instance, when it can see. When a thing cannot do so it is that thing only in name, like a dead eye or one made of stone, just as a wooden saw is no more a saw than one in a picture. “ (Met. IV 12 390a10-13) 27 So, for example, to say what a


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human being is, to define a human being, is to list the set of functions that are characteristic of human life. The human form or soul is the princple or cause of that array of activities. The idea that form is a functional notion, that species identification is secured by what an entity can do, might seem paradoxical. What about animals or plants that cannot perform their characteristic, species functions? What about human babies, for example, who are unable to reason and reproduce? Are they human or not? The answer to this puzzle weaves together Aristotle’s functionalism, and his teleological metaphysics. An immature human being is potentially human because it is potentially capable of performing the characteristic human functions. Its identity is secured by its end, which is to be a (mature) human being, and to be actually human, for Aristotle, is to be capable of doing the range of activities characteristic of creatures of that kind. Moreover, for Aristotle the notion of a function is intrinsically normative in the sense that it carries with it the idea of what is good for the entity in question, and hence what that entity ought to do. Aristotle’s ergon or function argument in the Nicomachaen Ethics turns on the connection between the idea that there is a human function and that performing that function constitutes the good life for a human being. 28 “For with a flautist or sculptor or any craftsman--or anything that has a particular thing to make or do--it is in what it does that its good (and its doing well) seems to reside. And so it would seem to be with man too, if there is in fact anything for him to do. ” (Bk I, 7 1097b25-29) Aristotle asserts that there is indeed a characteristically human function for which rational soul is the principle or cause. And it is the exercize of that function that constitutes the human good or excellence. For Aristotle, clearly, there is a normative dimension to functions, and, given his functional specification of form, a normative dimension to form.29 Normativity enters the realm of hylomorphism as well once we realize that form and matter are related to one another teleologically. Aristotle tells us that matter exists for the sake of form. (Met. IX 8 1050a15-16) But, ends for Aristotle are goods. (Met. I 983a31-32; 988b6-16) Moreover, the realization of form in matter, the process by which an organism becomes fully formed, in the sense of being able to perform the full range of its functions, is a teleological process. And the goal of that process, a fully formed, fully functioning animal or plant, for example, is not only that for the sake of which the process occurs, but it is also a good. The realization of a form in nature, as in art, is the realization of a good. Further, Aristotle argues not only that actualities (forms) are prior in being and knowledge to potentialities (matter), but also that actualities are better than potentialities. (Met. IX 9) Not only then are forms, as that for the sake of which natural processes occur, goods, but they are better than

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matter. Clearly, if we consider hylomorphism within the context of Aristotle’s teleological metaphysics, the theory is embedded in a network of normative claims.30 I have argued that the intrinsic normativity of hylomorphism can be located in three aspects of Aristotle’s theory of form. First, in so far as form is a functional notion it describes what an entity ought to do. Second, in so far as form is an end or goal it is a good. Third, form is prior to matter and better than matter. One of the themes of feminist critiques of both science and metaphysics has been the way in which political or normative concerns and categories shape and infiltrate purportedly descriptive, non-normative bodies of knowledge. Indeed, as I pointed out above, feminists have tended to interpret Aristotle’s metaphysics (and his biological writings) in this way. Given my argument concerning the intrinsic normativity of form in Aristotle, however, this approach to his thought is clearly misguided. For, there is no purely descriptive, non-normative theory of hylomorphism to begin with, and hence no non-normative metaphysical theory to be illicitly subverted by norms. This is not the occasion to consider in any detail the inherent merits or defects of Aristotle’s teleological metaphysics.31 I make a few comments on the perils and possibilities of an overtly normative metaphysics at the end. Here, I would like to consider another issue, namely how the kind of intrinsic normativity of form that I have been discussing is related to the gender associations that feminist historians of philosophy have noted. The two striking examples of political language in Aristotle’s theory of hylomorphism concern the way in which gender is associated with matter and form, and the fact that women (and slaves) seem not to have their forms fully; they are, in different ways, defectively rational. On the standard accounts, these statements reflect false beliefs about women (and slaves) and they also attach clearly political values to purportedly non-normative concepts. On my interpretation, Aristotle fills in, so to speak, the normative spaces in his theory with the categories of women (and slaves) in a way that reflects their status in his culture. This paper began with the puzzling idea that form is somehow male and matter is somehow female. Our central evidence was a passage from the Generation of Animals that explained sexual dimorphism as a means of keeping the better, more divine principle (form) from the inferior, material principle. The better, more divine principle needs a location separate from the inferior material principle. Hence, the need for two sexes. On my interpretation the characterization of the two principles in this text simply re-states the intrinsic normative features of form and matter in Aristotle’s hylomorphism. Their respective locations (form in the male and matter in the female), however, is not an intrinsic feature of hylomorphism. The locations of the better principle and the worse principle reflects the value


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accorded to men and women in Aristotle’s culture. Where would one locate a more divine, better principle than in the male, given the respective social and political positions of men and women? The second example of Aristotle’s tendency to describe form in political terms is the idea that women and slaves do not seem to have their forms fully because their capacity to reason is lacking. We should recall how this idea sits uneasily with the conception of form as a scientific, purely descriptive principle of species classification. Since it is not Aristotle’s view that women and slaves are different species from male non-slaves, it is impossible to rid his statements about the deformations of women and slaves of blatant inconsistency with the standard understanding of form as a principle of species classification. The teleological, normative view of form fits much better with Aristotle’s statements about form in women and slaves. For, on my view, having a form admits of degrees; one human being can be more fully formed (i.e. more capable of performing the human functions) than another. It might be helpful to recall my earlier discussion of immature substances, like a human baby, that cannot perform the full array of human functions. I pointed out earlier, and I have argued in detail elsewhere, that Aristotle would call the baby potentially human.32 Becoming human is a process and the human form can be realized to different degrees just as becoming an oak tree is a process and the oak form can be realized to different degrees. The more fully realized the form, the better the entity is in that it is more fully able to perform its function. I have argued that understanding form, matter and hylomorphism as intrinsically normative concepts fits well with Aristotle’s tendency to give them overt, political content. In particular I have argued that we find Aristotle reflecting the political realities of his day in the gender associations we find surrounding the notions of matter and form. Rather than indicting Aristotle for illicitly confusing the metaphysical and scientific with the normative and political, my interpretation pictures him as infusing his inherently normative metaphysics with the social and political realities and values of his time. Like the revisionist interpretation I described above, the normative interpretation of Aristotle’s metaphysics (and philosophy of nature) distinguishes between what is intrinsic to hylomorphism (functional and teleological norms) and what is extrinsic and, in principle, removable (inegalitarian gender associations).33 But, the feminist political theorist Susan Moller Okin has argued that Aristotle’s teleological and functionalist metaphysics were devised in order to justify the political status quo, including the oppression of women.34 In the next section, I consider Okin’s criticism, as well as the broader issue of whether or not a normative metaphysical theory is better suited to conservative political purposes than an objective, in the sense of non-normative, theory.

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3. METAPHYSICS, NORMS AND SEXISM A philosopher who sees reality and nature as structured by means of form and matter, a better and a worse, is very susceptible to identifying these evaluations with whatever norms are dominant in his culture. If it is believed that men are better than women, then it is easy to find that judgement to be anchored in, and to exemplify, what is better and worse in reality or nature. Metaphysical norms and cultural norms are linked together and reinforce one another. I have suggested that this is what is happening when Aristotle associates gender with hylomorphism. Susan Moller Okin has argued, however, that Aristotle’s functionalist metaphysics justifies his social conservatism and his misogyny. “Thus Aristotle has established a philosophical framework [functionalism] by which he can legitimize the status quo. For the conventional function of any person determines that person’s goodness, and a person’s nature, or natural condition, is also equated with his or her goodness. Every person, therefore is naturally suited to his or her existing role and position in society.”35 Okin depicts Aristotle’s functionalism as providing the theoretical framework that legitimizes the political status quo in Athens including the institution of slavery and the inequality of women. If Okin is correct, then Aristotle’s normative metaphysics can be of little interest to feminists. By functionalism Okin means three different things, which she tends to conflate in her discussion of Aristotle’s theory. First, she notes that Aristotle gives a functionalist account of the soul--“the soul of a thing is its capacity to fulfill its function”.36 This is the kind of functionalism that I discussed in section two in explaining how values are intrinsic to Aristotle’s metaphysics. I will refer to this thesis as functionalism. Second, she uses functionalism to refer to a view of reality in which all entities stand in a hierarchy of instrumental relationships to one another. This position Okin derives from two assumptions. The first is if an entity has a function, then it must stand in an instrumental relation to some other entity. The second is that Aristotle believed that all entities are ordered by instrumental relationships into a natural hierarchy. I will refer to this as the thesis of universal instrumental relations Third, she uses functionalism to refer to Aristotle’s sparse discussions of women’s place in society, which is constituted by her reproductive and household functions; the very functions assigned to women in misogynist Athenian society. I will refer to this as the thesis of gender functions. Okin’s claim is that functionalism justifies, and is intended to legitimate, the thesis of gender functions. Aristotle’s metaphysics provides legitimacy for the real-world functions of women in Athens, and their merely intrumental value in relation to men. Okin’s claim that Aristotle’s metaphysics is a system of justification for the political status quo links together the first sense of funtionalism to the


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third, or, in other words, ties the functional specification of form to the particular functions performed by Athenian women, which Okin characterizes as purely instrumental. The connection is secured by the second meaning of functionalism, the thesis of universal instrumental relations, which holds that all functions are instrumental, and argues that Aristotle’s general teleology connects all beings instrumentally. But the thesis of universal instrumental relations attributes views to Aristotle that he did not hold. First, Aristotle’s functional specification of form does not hold that all functions are instrumental, if by that is meant “exist for the sake of another being’s good”. Soul is the principle or cause of an array of life functions; but those functions are not instrumental--for the sake of--another being’s good. They are for the sake of the animal or plant itself; they are for its good or flourishing. So, Okin is simply wrong when she singles out man as the only being whose function and end is his own flourishing. “The proper activity of man alone among mortals has no end or aim outside of the actor himself”. 37 On the contrary, for all natural substances--men, women, dogs and cats--the life functions whose principle is soul are for their own good. Hence, if Aristotle did think that women had only instrumental worth, he would need grounds other than his functional specification of form for thinking so. Further, the other piece of Okin’s argument is also mistaken. On her view “His [Aristotle’s] entire universe, from the lowliest plant to the human race and beyond the human race to the heavenly bodies and the gods is arranged in strict hierarchy”.38 The purely instrumental relationship that Okin thinks relates all beings, does so in a strictly-ordered, teleological hierarchy that encompasses the universe. But Aristotle’s teleology did not operate to knit together all beings into a hierarchical union of instrumental relations. There is very little direct evidence to support a universal teleology in Aristotle. 39 This is because his teleological explanations of nature occur at the level of individual organisms; he does not develop a theory of how different species of plants and animals are instrumentally related to one another. Rather, he explains how their parts and processes are goal directed, where the goal is their own ability to live and to flourish40. Okin’s argument that hylomorphism (the thesis of functionalism) legitimates the inegalitarian status and functions assigned to women by Aristotle fails because it rests upon two positions that Aristotle did not hold.41 Without the thesis of universal instrumental relations, there is no connection between functionalism and the thesis of gender functions. Still, even if Aristotle’s functionalist metaphysics does not justify his embrace of inegalitarian gender norms, it might be reasonable to think that a normative metaphysical theory is more open to political abuses than a theory that claims to be objective in the sense of non-normative. Perhaps Aristotle’s easy assimilation of cultural belief and metaphyscical norms ought to

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persuade us that the modern world’s bifurcation of values and nature is a good idea. Shouldn’t feminist theorists above all insist upon the separation of norms and nature as perhaps the only way of avoiding the inscription into nature of our inequality? Unfortunately, metaphysical and scientific theories that posit nature as a value-free zone are equally prone to their own insidious form of bias. One merely sees the actual political inequality as rooted in non-value laden, objective facts or realities. Women simply have smaller brains or different brains--it’s a fact proven by science! As I remarked at the beginning of this paper, feminist philosophers have written at length about the authority asserted by the idea of objectivity in science and metaphysics, and the abuses of that authority. What is really at issue for feminists in both Aristotle and his modern brethren is the attempt to connect social inequalities to some underlying scientific or metaphysical reality, and not whether or not that reality is itself normative. So, while I do think that a normative metaphysics can reinforce actual political inequality, so, too, can theories that claim to be about an objective, value-less world. With regard to the question of using a theory of nature to enforce or encode inegalitarian political ideas, it makes no difference whether the object of inscription, nature, is conceived of as containing values or as value-free. But, if there is nothing to chose between them on this point, why should feminists be interested in the Aristotelian perspective? I think that it is of interest for two reasons. First, because it suggests that feminists engaged in re-thinking the image of modern science and the scientist have ignored an important piece of that image: the image of nature, of what is known, of what is real. The feminist, critical evaluation of the ideal of objectivity, and the re-invention of a richer, more adequate notion is incomplete in so far as it does not consider one assumption of that ideal, namely the way that nature is characterized. But, it is only in considering an alternative view, like Aristotle’s, that a particular view of nature can emerge as an assumption to be queried, rather than as simply the way things are. There is a second point. Aristotle provides a useful reminder to those who are trying to articulate when and how norms and values enter into theory that locating them on the side of the theorist alone accepts uncritically the image of nature formed by modern science. Perhaps, as Aristotle asks us to believe, and as some ecofeminists argue, there are values in nature and on the side of the inquirer. If so, then the entire debate over values and norms in science (and theory in general) is too simple, and an adequate account is a complex weave of the theorizer’s values and the norms of nature. Aristotle’s hylomorphism provides a picture of how that might look. So, I recommend Aristotle’s normative metaphysics to feminists because it asks us to think critically about all the assumptions of modern science and metaphysics in a holistic fashion, rather than to focus


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exclusively upon the figure of the disinterested scientist or the view-fromnowhere metaphysician.42

NOTES 1 For example, see the following papers in Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology and Philosophy of Science ed. By Sandra Harding and Merrill B. Hintikka (D. Reidel 1983): “Have Only Men Evolved?” by Ruth Hubbard; “Evolution and Patriarchal Myths of Scarcity and Competition” by Michael Gross and Mary Beth Averill; “The Man of Professional Wisdom” by Kathryn Pyne Addelson; “Gender and Science” by Evelyn Fox Keller; “How Can Language Be Sexist” by Merrill Hintikka and Jaako Hintikka. Also see Cynthia Freeland’s discussion of gendered concepts in Rereading the Canon: Feminist Interpretations of Aristotle (University Park, Penn State Press, 1998), p. 10. 2 For a discussion of gender and hylomorphism see Cynthia Freeland’s “Nourishing Speculation: A Feminist Reading of Aristotelian Science” in Engendering Origins ed. by Bat-Ami Bar On (New York 1994) and Elizabeth Spelman’s “Aristotle and the Politicization of the Soul in Discovering Reality . Gender in Arisotle’s theory of reproduction is discussed in Nancy Tuana’s “Aristotle and the Politics of Reproduction” in Engendering Origins, and in Linda Lange’s “Woman is Not a Rational Animal: On Aristotle’s Biology of Reproduction” in Discovering Reality. 3 Evelyn Fox Keller is a possible exception in that she suggests changes in both the relationship between science and nature (from one of dominance to eros) and the way that nature is thought of. She suggests that Barbara McClintock has a richer, more complex view of nature than her fellow scientists; a view which contains qualitative, normative descriptions of nature. ( See Reflections on Science and Gender, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985) p. 162-5) However, Keller is most concerned to describe a new, richer relationship between scientist and nature, and her comments on a new view of nature are sketchy. 4 In Reflections on Gender and Science Evelyn Fox Keller uses the theory of “object relations” to show how objectivity is constructed in a gendered way, and then argues that the objectivity that characterizes modern science is a projection of objectivity as it is developed in male psyches. In other words, scientific objectivity is androcentric, and is rooted in male psychological development. (69-126) In The Science Question in Feminism (Cornell University Press, 1986) Sandra Harding also argues that objectivity as value-neutrality is androcentric, but she provides a social constructivist account of its origin. (227-8) These interpretations of objectivity as androcentric can be read together because Keller’s psychological account can be housed within Hardings’s broader historical interpretation. 5 “Conclusion: Epistemological Questions” in Feminism and Methodology ed. by Sandra Harding (Indiana 1987), 182. 6 Postmodernist feminists would question the stability and identity of the theorizer, but we can overlook that wrinkle here, because they accept in general the thesis of the social construction of knowledge. 7 Lorraine Code’s Rhetorical Spaces: Essays on Gendered Locations (New York, Routledge 1995) argues that the ideals of objectivity and value-neutrality are neither possible nor desirable. In her view “objectitvity requires taking subjectivity into account.” (44) The task for feminist epistemologists is to make the case that investigations guided by feminist political committment result in better knowledge than, for example, research guided by sexist or racist committment.

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See Sandra Harding’s description of the connection between the characteristics attributed to scientists and the objects of science in the modern period in The Science Question in Feminism , p. 227-228. 9 Both Evelyn Fox Keller and Lorraine Code have suggested new, richer images for the relationship between scientist and nature. Keller proposes an erotic relationship whereas Code thinks that the model should be knowing a person. It is interesting that in both cases the way that nature is thought of changes, away from the quantitative and inert and towards the qualitative and normative. The argument in this paper can be seen as supporting the idea that a reconsideration of the attributes of the theorizer, the objects of theory and the relationship between the two is a wholistic endeavour. You just can’t love a quantum. 10 Philosophers of social science, from a variety of perspectives, have argued that the objects of social science (humans, dasein, us) have normative features like rationality, and that these features demand verstehen rather than ordinary scientific explanation. Aristotle’s view is broader in that he holds that all natural objects have normative features, and it is different in that the normativity of nature is not anchored in the rationality or self-consciousness of natural entities. 11 My paper does not argue that it is because of Aristotle’s inegalitarian views on gender (etc.) that he developed hylomorphism, his normative view of nature. That is I do not assign a causal role to Aristotle’s false beliefs about men and women in the development of his theory as Cynthia Freeland does in “Nourishing Speculation”. I leave the causal question open. 12 In “Teleology in Aristotelian Science and Metaphysics” in Methodos in Ancient Philosophy ed. Jyl Gentzler (Oxford University Press 1998). 13 For a feminist critique of the metaphysical tradition see Genvieve Lloyd’s The Man of Reason (Minnesota 1984). For a discussion and evaluation of feminist criticisms of metaphysics see my paper “Feminism and Metaphysics” in A Mind of One’s Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objecitivity (Westview 1992). 14 See What is Nature?: Culture, politics, and the non-human (Oxford, Blackwell 1995) by Kate Soper, and Radical Ecology by Carolyn Merchant (Routledge 1992). 15 See Women in Western Political Thought (Princeton 1979), chapter 4. 16 Along similar lines, Nancy Tuana in “Aristotle and the Politics of Reproduction” has argued that Aristotle’s biological account of reproduction both was caused by, and provides theoretical support for, the belief that women are inferior to men. Marguerite Deslauriers argues against this interpretation in Re-reading the Canon: Feminist Interpretations of Aristotle. 17 In “On Irigaray on Aristotle” in Re-reading the Canon: Feminist Interpretations of Aristotle Cynthia Freeland maintains a gendered interpretation of form and matter, and in her contribution to the same volume, Marguerite Deslauriers argues against a gendered interpretation. 18 A distinct issue of concern to feminist philosophers and historians of science is the secondary role that Aristotle assigns to women in his account of reproduction. See Nancy Tuana’s “Aristotle and the Politics of Reproduction” for a feminist perspective on the role of women in reproduction. Recent discussions among Aristotle specialists have stressed another issue, which is the difficulty posed to Aristotle’s view that all formal determination is via the male semen by the phenomenon of inherited characteristics. In “Metaphysics in Aristotle’s Embryology” (Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 214 1988) John Cooper argues that Aristotle can provide an adequate, internally consistent explanation of inherited characteristics that attributes all formal determination to the male. However, in “Biomedical Models of Reproduction in the Fifth Centruy BC and Aristotle’s Generation of Animals” (Phronesis Vol. XLI 1995) Andrew Coles provides compelling grounds for questioning the internal coherence of Aristotle’s demotion of the female role. While I think that this is an important issue in evaluating Aristotle’s attitude towards women, I do not explore it directly


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in this paper. Here, I am interested in his account of reproduction in so far as it contains gender associations with matter and form, and not in so far as it reveals Aristotle’s inability to assign to women their proper reproductive role. 19 Gen. An. 732A2-10; 765b9-10; 775a15; 1, 22; Phy. 1 9 192a22-3. 20 Politics 1260a8-14 21 The association of form with males and matter with females holds even if we pay attention to certain important details in this text. The first point is that Aristotle often uses “male” and “female” to refer to the reproductive organs of men and women. (Gen An. 716b30;732a1716B30;732a1-3;766a19;768a7) What is being called better in this text is, strictly speaking, the male sex organ and not the male person. Further, strictly speaking, the male (sex organ) is identified with the principle of movement that conveys the form to the matter and not with the form itself. However, even with these refinements in place there remains a set of gender associations with matter and form since male sex organs are regularly found in men and female sex organs in women. 22 For a discussion of the way in which Luce Irigaray has treated the connection between women and matter in the Greek philosophical tradition, see Cynthia Freeland “On Irigaray on Aristotle” in Re-reading the Canon: Feminist Interpretations of Aristotle. 23 For a full discussion of the evidence suppporting the claim that male and female are not different species, see “Sex and Essence in Aristotle’s Metaphysics and Biology” by Marguerite Deslauriers in Re-reading the Canon: Feminist Interpretations of Aristotle. 24 For an interesting and persuasive interpretation of how women are defective see Deborah Modrak’s “Aristotle: Women, Deliberation, and Nature” in Engendering Origins. 25 Two recent studies of Aristotle’s Metaphysics that emphasize the role form plays in species classification are Frank Lewis’ Substance and Predication in Aristotle (Cambridge 1991), and Primary “Ousia”: An Essay on Aristotle’s “Metaphysics” Z and H (Cornell 1991) by Michael Loux. 26 Recently there has been a vigorous scholarly debate over the question of whether or not Aristotle’s biology contains a taxonomical project. For a discussion of this issue from a feminist perspective see Cynthia Freeland’s “Nourishing Speculation: A Feminist Reading of Aristotelian Science” in Engendering Origins. For a non-feminist argument against taxonomy in Aristotle’s biology, see Aristotle’s Classification of Animals: Biology and the Conceptual Unity of the Aristotelian Corpus by Pierre Pelligrin, tr. A. Preus (California 1986). 27 See also Politics 1 1253a; G.A. I 19 726b 22-24, II 1 734b 24-27; De An. II 1 412b 18-22. 28 Whether and in what way this argument is fallacious has been the object of debate among scholars. I am not concerned with this question here. Rather I want to use this text as evidence that Aristotle thought that the notion of a function warranted an inference to a normative conclusion. 29 My interpretation of the ergon argument is widely accepted by scholars. It is criticized in Alfonso Gomez-Lobo’s “The Ergon Inference” Phronesis Vol. XXXIV/2 (1989). 30 My evidence is intended to show that Aristotle used normative language in his account of form, matter and their relationship. I do not address the further philosophical issue of whether or not “good” in this context is the moral good. Notoriously, Aristotle does not differentiate the moral good from other goods, so we can claim that forms are normative in the sense available to Aristotle. 31 I explain the way in which Aristotle’s teleological metaphysics differs from teleology in his natural philosophy in “Teleology in Aristotelian Science and Metaphysics” in Methodos in Ancient Philosophy ed. Jyl Gentzler (Oxford University Press,1998). And I discuss Aristotle’s reason for holding that actuality (form) is prior to potentiality (matter) in “The Priority of Actuality in Aristotle” in The Identity and Unity of Aristotelian Substances ed. T. Scaltsas, D. Charles and M.L. Gill (Oxford University Press 1994). 32 In the “Priority of Actuality in Aristotle”.

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33

Although I take the reformist position that the explicit gender associations in Aristotle’s text are removable without compromising hylomorphism, obviously the theory that results will not reflect accurately Aristotle’s ideas. I have never been interested in writing an apology for Aristotle, and I think the interest in his texts for feminists resides both in their unaltered states, and in the alternatives they offer to standard modern philosophical categories. 34 In Shame and Necessity (Berkeley, 1993) Bernard Williams has argued a similar point with regard to Aristotle’s attempt to justify the institution of slavery. 35 Women in Western Political Thought, p.80. 36 Okin, p. 75 37 Okin, p. 77. 38 Okin, p. 77. 39 For a discussion of this issue see John Cooper’s “Aristotle on Natural Teleology” in Language and Logos: Studies in Ancient Greek Philosophy ed. Malcolm Schofield and Martha Craven Nussbaum (Cambridge 1982). 40 Reproduction is part of the function of individual animal and plants. But, for Aristotle, reproduction is for the sake of achieving whatever immortality is available to mortals; even in this case, the goal is a good of the individual animal or plant. 41 The other piece of Okin’s case against Aristotle as the philosopher of the status quo concerns his philosophical method: dialectic. “Unlike Plato, he [Aristotle] does not argue, in dealing with ethics any more than with biology, that the world should be different from the way it is, but starts from a basic belief that the status quo in both the natural and the social realm is the best way for things to be.” [74] Note that this view of Aristotle’s method does not provide an argument that shows that his metaphysics of hylomorphism was intended to justify the political inequality of women. Rather, it points out that his method of dialectic, which considers the opinions of the wise and the many to be important data, has a conservative tendency. The question of how to understand dialectic has received a great deal of scholarly attention since Okin published her book, however, and her view underestimates the critical resources of Aristotle’s method. 42 I am indebted to Cynthia Freeland, for her criticisms of an earlier version, and also to Mark Okrent for his helpful suggestions.

REFERENCES Addelson, Kathryn Pyne. “The Man of Professional Wisdom” In Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology and Philosophy of Science. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003. Bar On, Bat-Ami. Ed. Engendering Origins: Critical Feminist Readings in Plato and Aristotle. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994. Code, Lorraine Rhetorical Spaces: Essays on Gendered Locations. New York: Routledge, 1995. Coles, Andrew. “Biomedical Models of Reproduction in the Fifth Centruy BC and Aristotle’s Generation of Animals”. In Phronesis Vol. XLI 1995. Cooper, John. “Aristotle on Natural Teleology”. In Language and Logos: Studies in Ancient Greek Philosophy ed. Malcolm Schofield and Martha Craven Nussbaum. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Cooper, John. “Metaphysics in Aristotle’s Embryology” Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 214 1988.


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Deslauriers, Margaret. “Sex and Essence in Aristotle’s Metaphysics and Biology”. In Feminist Interpretations of Aristotle ed. Cynthia Freeland. University Park: Penn State University Press, 1998. Freeland, Cynthia. “Nourishing Speculation: A Feminist Reading of Aristotelian Science”. In Engendering Origins: Critical Feminist Readings in Plato and Aristotle ed. By Bat-Ami Bar On. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994. Gomez-Lobo, Alfonso. “The Ergon Inference”. In Phronesis Vol. XXXIV/2 (1989). Gross, Michael and Averill, Mary Beth. “Evolution and Patriarchal Myths of Scarcity and Competition” In Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology and Philosophy of Science. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003. Harding, Sandra. The Science Question in Feminism_Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986. Harding Sandra. “Conclusion: Epistemological Questions” in Feminism and Methodology ed. by Sandra Harding. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. Harding, Sandra and Hintikka, Merrill B. Eds. Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology and Philosophy of Science. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003. Hintikka, Merrill and Hintikka, Jaako. “How Can Language Be Sexist”. In Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology and Philosophy of Science. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003. Hubbard, Ruth. “Have Only Men Evolved?” In Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology and Philosophy of Science. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003. Keller, Evelyn Fox. Reflections on Gender and Science .New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996. Keller, Evelyn Fox. “Gender and Science”. In Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology and Philosophy of Science. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003. Lange, Linda. “Woman is Not a Rational Animal: On Aristotle’s Biology of Reproduction” in Harding, Sandra and Hintikka, Merrill B. Eds. Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology and Philosophy of Science. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003. Lewis, Frank. Substance and Predication in Aristotle Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Loux, Michael. Primary “Ousia”: An Essay on Aristotle’s “Metaphysics” Z and H . Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991. Merchant, Carolyn. Radical Ecology New York: Routledge, 1992. Modrak, Deborah “Aristotle: Women, Deliberation, and Nature”. In Engendering Origins: Critical Feminist Readings in Plato and Aristotle ed. By Bat-Ami Bar On. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994. Pellegrin, Pierre. Aristotle’s Classification of Animals: Biology and the Conceptual Unity of the Aristotelian Corpus. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Soper, Kate. What is Nature?: Culture, politics, and the non-human. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995. Spelman, Elizabeth. “Aristotle and the Politicization of the Soul” in Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology and Philosophy of Science. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003. Tuana, Nancy. “Aristotle and the Politics of Reproduction” in Bar On, Bat-Ami. Ed. Engendering Origins: Critical Feminist Readings in Plato and Aristotle. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994. Williams, Bernard. Shame and Necessity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Witt, Charlotte. “Teleology in Aristotelian Science and Metaphysics”. In Methodos in Ancient Philosophy ed. Jyl Gentzler. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

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Witt, Charlotte. “The Priority of Actuality in Aristotle” in The Identity and Unity of Aristotelian Substances ed. T. Scaltsas, D. Charles and M.L. Gill. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.

THE SOUL-BODY UNION AND SEXUAL DIFFERENCE FROM DESCARTES TO MERLEAU-PONTY AND BEAUVOIR

Sara Heinämaa (University of Helsinki, Finland)

In feminist philosophy, Descartes has long been attacked as an androcentric thinker, par excellence. The common notion of many feminist critics working in traditions as different as analytical philosophy, Marxism, and theoretical psychoanalysis has been that Cartesianism is merely, or mainly, a hindrance to feminist concerns.1 Recently, several Descartes scholars with feminist orientations have challenged this view. Lisa Shapiro (1997, 1999a, 1999b), Martina Reuter (1999, 2000, 2004) and Lilli Alanen (2002, 2004) have argued to the contrary that Descartes’ intellectual heritage contains a variety of powerful critical resources.2 The work of these philosophers shows that we find in Descartes not just ideas and arguments that have been crucial to feminist thought and movement, but also intellectual resources whose power has not yet been fully utilized or even realized. For one, Descartes explicates and develops the concept of equal reason which is central to feminist arguments for women’s education and scholarship. Second, his arguments against dogmatic philosophy and stagnated practices and habits of thinking are paradigmatic of any philosophical enterprise emphasizing criticism and self-inquiry. But even more interestingly, Descartes scholars argue that we can find in Descartes works, especially in his correspondence with Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, a rich and fruitful notion of the unity of mind and body as well as promising ethical reflections.3


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This interpretative work has opened a new perspective on a philosophical tradition that feminists of earlier decades have abandoned or bypassed. Thus it offers intellectual alternatives to anti-Cartesian doctrines that are currently dominant in the pragmatic-analytical as well as in the Continental tradition. However, most feminist commentators still agree that Descartes’ metaphysics does not allow for an integrated view of sexual difference. The common understanding is that his dualistic ontology divides the scientific discourse on humans into two separate realms: a philosophical reflection on non-sexed intellects with equal capacities and functions, and a physiological and practical account of men and women. On Cartesian premises, it is believed, no unified philosophy of sexual difference is possible. I argue in this paper that there is an alternative way of reading Descartes that contests this conception. The alternative is not new but already over half a century old, as set forth in Simone de Beauvoir’s feminist classic, Le deuxième sexe (1949). To see this option, however, requires some preparatory work, for Beauvoir’s text does not contain any explicit interpretations of Descartes but instead exhibits Cartesian thinking in operation. To start the work of thinking—thinking about the sexual difference with Descartes—we need to turn first to Beauvoir’s colleague and collaborator, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and to recall his revivification of Descartes’ philosophy in Phénoménologie de la perception (1945). The Cartesian background of Beauvoir’s feminist meditation on sexual difference shows up only when her work is related to its conceptual and methodic environment within phenomenological philosophy.4

1. THE POSITION OF THE LIVING BODY IN CARTESIAN METAPHYSICS In Phénoménologie de la perception, Merleau-Ponty develops a challenging interpretation of Descartes’ discourse on living bodies.5 He rejects the physicalistic reading according to which Descartes’ epistemology reduces all living bodies to mere mechanisms—complex to be sure, but still explicable in purely causal terms. According to Merleau-Ponty, Descartes does not offer us a single concept of the body but instead develops two independent accounts. On the one hand, we have the mechanistic paradigm that presents the body as a system of causal and functional relations, while on the other hand, we have a normative paradigm that describes the body as an indivisible organic unity (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 231/199). In the first model, the body is compared to a machine; in the second, its unity resembles that of a work of art (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 175–177/150–151).

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The organic paradigm of the body is usually explained as a relic from scholastic discussions, but Merleau-Ponty argues that it receives a new interpretation when rethought within the framework of Descartes’ epistemology. This suggestion is not without textual support; on the contrary, in Descartes’ The Passions of the Soul (Part I, §30), we find the following explanation: But in order to understand all these things more perfectly, we need to recognize that the soul is really joined to the whole body, and that we cannot properly say that it exists in any one part of the body to the exclusion of others. For the body is a unity which is in a sense indivisible because of the arrangement of its organs, these being so related to one another that the removal of any one of them renders the whole body defective (Descartes AT XI 351, CMS I 339).

Similar passages can be found in other works and more importantly in the correspondence (e.g., Descartes AT IV 166–167, CSM-K 243, AT III 661, 682–685).6 Descartes argues that we can think of the body as a mechanical system but also as an organic totality, and both conceptions are justified in their own right (Descartes AT III 691–693, CSM-K 227). As is well known these two ways of thinking are not on an equal footing in Descartes’ epistemology. Thus Merleau-Ponty regrets in Phénoménologie that in terms of epistemic primacy Descartes subordinates the experiential account of the living body to the mechanistic explanation (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 231).7 The solution is reflected in the conviction that the soul-body union does not belong among the themes of first philosophy but can be studied and discussed only within the limits of the dependent sciences such as physiology, medicine, and ethics. Thus understood, the idea of the union would be philosophically insignificant; it would only serve the practical ends of survival and well-being but have no grain of apodictic truth in it (cf. Alanen 2002, 6, Reuter 2000, 58–59, 146, 2004, 96–97, 117). For feminist philosophers the outcome is disquieting: neither sexuality nor sexual difference would seem to belong among the topics of philosophy proper (cf. Reuter 2000, 147, 2004, 118). The main way out of this Cartesian dilemma has been to question its founding assumption, i.e. the idea of epistemology as first philosophy. The anti-epistemological solution has been recommended by many feminist thinkers, working in the different traditions of naturalism, pragmatism, Marxism, hermeneutics, decorstruction, and ethical metaphysics.8 I argue, however, that Merleau-Ponty’s critical reflections suggest that it is not necessary to abandon Descartes’ epistemological framework in order to establish a philosophical discourse of sexual difference. He proposes that, instead of rejecting Cartesian epistemology, we should work to radicalize it.

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Merleau-Ponty departs from most commentators in thinking that the reduction of the soul-body compound to a merely practical idea is not an outcome of Descartes’ epistemological principles. He argues that, on the contrary, it is Descartes’ failure to follow his own guidelines that leads to this unhappy conclusion: What caused the problem was not the ideal of clarity and distinction, but a prejudiced notion of sensations. In order to see what is at issue in Merleau-Ponty’s proposal, we need to go into his diagnosis of the problematic epistemic status of sense experiences. Merleau-Ponty argues that if Descartes had been careful in following the criteria of clear and distinct thought, he would not have ended up banning sensations, sense perceptions, and emotions from his first philosophy, but would have realized that they too can be included among apodictic ideas. It is important to notice that in The Principles of Philosophy (Part I, §46) Descartes himself acknowledged the possibility of rendering passions distinct. For example, when someone feels an intense pain, the perception he has of it is indeed very clear but is not always distinct. For people commonly confuse this perception with an obscure judgment which they make concerning the nature of something which they think exists in the painful spot and which they suppose to resemble the sensation of pain (Descartes AT VIIIA 22, CSM I 208, my italics).

And further: There remains sensations, emotions, and appetites. These may be clearly perceived provided we take great care in our judgments concerning them to include nothing more than what is strictly contained in our perception — no more than that of which we have inner awareness. But this is a very difficult rule to observe, at least with regard to sensations (Descartes AT VIIIA 32, CSM I 216, my italics).

What Descartes says here is that passions are very seldom distinct but they can—in principle—be purified from confusion. However, as MerleauPonty points out, according to Descartes, such a process of purification renders passions obsolete for the purposes of inference. We are left with thoughts, completely clear to be sure, but with no inner structure or relation to any other thoughts (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 9ff./3ff.). The sensation of pain, for example, when purified from confused thoughts about its origin, contains no other qualities than the sensible quality of pain (Descartes AT VIIA 22, CSM I 208). Similarly the perception of white includes in it nothing but this particular color (Descartes AT VII 82, CSM II 56–57), and again, the sensation of the sound of the bell, when purified of confusions, is equally barren (Descartes AT XI 346, CSM 1337). The originality of Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Descartes lies in his understanding of the reasons that led Descartes to exclude sense experience


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from metaphysics. According to Merleau-Ponty, Descartes does not reject passions on the ground that they are confused thoughts by definition. Instead he leaves them out because they are useless for the purposes of inference. No new truths can be concluded from them. When purified from confusion, sensations, sense perceptions, and emotions, are like dispersed grains of truth. So in order to give passions a philosophical status, we do not need to abandon the methodic guideline of clarity and distinctiveness or the idea of epistemology as first philosophy. Instead, we are free to question Descartes’ account of the nature of sense experiences.9 This is exactly what MerleauPonty does in his Phénoménologie. Basing his reflections on phenomenological interpretations of Gestalt psychology, he argues that sensations do not provide “pure qualities,” i.e. atom-like or point-like factors of experience; they have an internal structure and they are internally related to one another in complex ways (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 9ff./3ff., 429–432/374–376). Merleau-Ponty refers to Sartre’s example of a red patch. This red patch which I see on the carpet is red only in virtue of a shadow which lies across it [...] finally this red would not literally be the same if it were not the “wooly red” of a carpet (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 10/5).

He continues the argument later by using Descartes’ example of pain felt in an amputated limb: When [...] I am sure of having sensed, the certainty of some external thing is involved in the very way in which the sensation is articulated and unfolded before me: it is a pain in the leg (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 431/376).

Merleau-Ponty’s claim is that together with the quality of red other qualities are given to us, qualities of valor, texture, etc. All these are present to the mind with equal evidence. Similarly the quality of pain is accompanied by visual, tactile, and kinaesthetic qualities that together constitute the appearance of the leg.10 What is given is not an isolated flash of suffering but a pain belonging to a leg. In Merleau-Ponty’s account, sense experiences give us our own bodies as organic wholes. Further, he argues that if we have the patience to study these thoughts in their own right, without adjusting them to the purposes of explanation and prediction from a third-person perspective, then they show up in the clarity and distinctiveness that Descartes required from the components of first philosophy. Thus, our own living bodies do not simply fall outside Cartesian metaphysics. They too belong to the first constitutive science, and must be studied accordingly. To be sure, we cannot deduce or induce any chain of apodictic truths from sense experiences, but we can, and we must—if we are not held back by prejudices about the nature of the

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philosophical science—describe them as they are given to us in their mode of evidence. This is the task Merleau-Ponty sets for himself in his Phénoménologie. He studies three aspects of living bodies in particular: spatiality, motility and sexuality. He does not intend his descriptions as fragments of an empirical theory nor does he present them as practical guidelines for manipulating or interpreting human behavior. The aim is instead to provide the foundation for the natural and human sciences of living bodies, biosciences as well as sciences of the psyche and of society. Thus MerleauPonty’s project is certainly foundational, but the foundation he provides is not a set of axiomatic truths about living bodies, but an explication and analysis of the meanings involved in our experience of such realities.11 In the following, I will outline the main elements of Merleau-Ponty’s account of sexuality and then introduce the reader to Beauvoir’s subtle elaboration and critique of this account. The aim is to give an overview of a philosophy of sexual difference that is regulated not by the practical ends of survival, well-being, or happiness, but by the idea of truth that is valid for all thinking beings (cf. Beauvoir 1949a, 30–31/28).

2. SEXUALITY AND SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN A CARTESIAN VEIN Although Merleau-Ponty dedicates a whole chapter of his Phénoménologie to the topic of sexuality, the aim is not to offer any theory of sexuality. Rather Merleau-Ponty argues that only through the study of sexual and erotic relations can we come to understand how objects in general are given to us in experience. He begins the chapter of sexuality by writing: If we want to bring to light the birth of being for us, we must finally look at that area of our experience which clearly has significance and reality only for us, and that is our affective life. Let us try to see how a thing or a being begins to exist for us through desire12 and love and we shall thereby come to understand better how things can exist in general (MerleauPonty 1945, 180/154).

So Merleau-Ponty focuses on sexual experiences in order to illuminate the foundations of experience. The argument is that all sense perception— and all modes of experience resting on the basis of perception—have an affective basis. Thus Merleau-Ponty does not aim at theorizing about sexuality or explaining it. Instead, he aims at describing sexuality as a basic modality of experience. According to Merleau-Ponty, the sound core of Freud’s writings is the realization that sexuality is absorbed with life (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 197/169). The mistake of the reductionist interpretations of psychoanalysis


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is that they assume that this “osmosis” can be understood and described in causal terms (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 199–202/171–173). This is not the case. Instead of causing other forms of behaviour, sexual activity expresses them, and conversely, is expressed in them. Thus, the totality of a person’s bodily activities—movements, postures and gestures—forms an expressive whole from which no element can be segregated. More generally, a person’s sexuality condenses her way of relating to the world, its things and events. Her erotic life realizes the style that is also manifested in her other relationships, practical, theoretical and aesthetic. Her ways of caressing are intertwined with her ways of walking and resting, grasping and throwing, greeting, speaking, and thinking. As Merleau-Ponty explains: Thus sexuality is not an autonomous cycle. It has internal links with the whole of active and cognitive being, these three sections of behavior manifesting but a single typical structure, and standing in a relationship to each other of reciprocal expression (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 184/157).

Thus, all areas of behavior are connected to sexuality. But the connection is not external. It is internal in the sense that the connected terms cannot be understood or even identified without reference to each other. What is sexual in a person’s life or in the life of a community can be seen and understood only by studying the whole of that person’s or community’s behavior. Neither sexuality nor any other area of activity, for example cognition or communication, can be regarded as original to humanity, since they presuppose each other. Sexual behavior is not a manifestation of a more profound mode of experience. But neither is the reverse true; the other modes of activity and passivity, e.g. intellectual or artistic, are not determined by a more primordial sexuality (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 185– 194/159–166). Rather sexuality forms, together with other modes of behavior, a unified whole similar to a text or a work of art. All elements refer to each other and are understandable only in terms of each other (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 197/169). Merleau-Ponty uses the modal13 concepts of manner and style not just to describe sexual behavior and erotic relations, but also to characterize sexual identities. He writes: A woman passing by is not first and foremost a corporeal contour for me, a colored mannequin, or a spectacle. [...] She is a certain manner of being flesh which is given entirely in her walk or even in the simple shock of her heel on the ground - as the tension of the bow is present in each fiber of wood - a very noticeable variation of the norm of walking, looking, touching, and speaking that I possess in my self-awareness because I am body (MerleauPonty 1947, 67–68/54).

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In Merleau-Ponty’s account, being a man or being a woman is not a question of possessing some fixed property or several properties. Sexual identities are not constants in the multitude of behaviors. They develop and change in time, and this holds for all levels of experience, mental and bodily, personal and anonymous. Still we perceive permanence, not the constancy of a substance or an attribute, but the continuity of a mode of acting—comparable to that of a habit, a style or a tradition. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology inspired Simone de Beauvoir to develop a new way of discussing the relations between men and women.14 This can be seen already at the beginning of Le deuxième sexe. When Beauvoir introduces her well-known idea of woman as “a becoming”, her reference is to Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of sexuality and transcendence: It is only within a human perspective that one can compare the female and the male of the human species. But the definition of human is that he is a being that is not given, a being that makes itself be what it is. As MerleauPonty very justly says, man is not a natural species but a historical idea. Woman is not a fixed reality but a becoming. It is in her becoming that she should be compared with man, that is to say, that her possibilities should be defined. [...] when one considers a being that is transcendence and overcoming, then the account can never be closed (Beauvoir 1949a, 73/66). Merleau-Ponty’s modal concepts of style and manner allowed Beauvoir to pose the question of woman’s being in a new way, not as a question of “what she is” but as a question of “how she is.” For Beauvoir, women and men are two different variations of the human way of existence: “they live in their different ways the strange ambiguity of existence made body” (Beauvoir 1949b, 658/737). Thus the basic concept of her feminist argument is the experiential difference between two types of living bodies, women’s bodies and men’s bodies. In her understanding, these are the two main variations of human embodiment, and every singular human life is a particular variation of one of them, or else combines elements from both (Beauvoir 1949a, 9/33). Accordingly, Beauvoir’s primary distinction is not between two types of organisms, female organisms and male organisms. In her understanding, such entities are abstract objects of natural scientific inquiries.15 Her argument is that we can—and must—study the relation between woman and man not merely as a relation between two physiological or psychophysiological systems, but equally importantly as a relation between two corporeal persons. Thus understood, sexual identity or sexual difference certainly has both a “psychic” or “mental side” and a “bodily side.” However, these should not be understood as two separate realities connected by external links, be they causal or functional. The becoming of woman, discussed by Beauvoir, is not a process of socialization in which a separate layer of culturally


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determined gender features is added to a biologically determined sex.16 What she thematizes and describes acutely is an intentional process in which a sentient living body enters into a communicative relationship with other bodies and thus adopts new meanings and directions. Ultimately, masculinity and femininity are, in Beauvoir’s analysis, two variations of our basic ways of relating to the world. Every individual person creates an interpretation or a modification of one of these two principal variations. Most modifications develop and amplify the duality, but some work to undo or annul it. The development of a sexual identity, in any case, is not accounted for by the concepts of inheritance and properties, but by the concepts of imitation and mimicry, repetition and modification. When sexual identity is understood in this way—by modal concepts— then similarity and difference are relational and dynamic concepts. Women are similar, not by what they are, but by how they relate to different kinds of objects, inert and living, abstract and concrete. The relationships to be studied are not just those women have with men, children and other women, but they include all kinds of relationships perceptual and motor, emotional and intellectual, real and possible, to different kinds of things (Beauvoir 1949a, 93/81–82, 1949b, 349/512). This does not mean that sexual identity is a question of choice. To suggest that we decide to be men and women is to commit an intellectualist fallacy. Sexual identities are not and cannot be determined by will, they are experienced and formed already on the level of perception and motility.17 Understood in this way, there is certainly generality and unity between women. Every individual woman is conceived of as a singular stylistic variation of the feminine way of being (Beauvoir 1949a, 9/33). As such she both realizes the feminine way of relating to the world and modifies it. Similarly every individual man is a variation of the masculine way of being, and thus contributes to the constitution of this general type. Together, then, these variations form the general mode of human life. Thus, we can legitimately speak of “femininity” and “the feminine reality” (Beauvoir 1949a, 32/29). But the generality of the feminine is not that of a fixed idea, captured by exact concepts. Femininity resides neither within feminine singulars nor above them, but in the relationships between the singulars. We cannot detect it in any one act or thing, because it is a dynamic, open structure which characterizes the whole of actions and things. Its earlier phases do not determine its future modifications, but they do suggest different alternatives, and open up horizons for possible actions. In the end of Le deuxième sexe, Beauvoir writes that “[t]here is a whole region of human experience which the male deliberately chooses to ignore because he fails to think about it: this experience woman lives” (Beauvoir 1949b, 501/622).

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The original French title of the second volume of Le deuxième sexe is “L’expérience vécue,” which means “lived experience” or “experience as it is lived” (German Erlebnis). This is a technical term introduced by French phenomenologists to describe the object of their study, i.e. experience in all its multiplicity purified from theoretical and commonsense preconceptions about existence. Beauvoir saw this as the proper objective of philosophy: to describe pure experience—sense experiences as well as imagination and reflection—in all its variety. She took it as her task to focus her study on the experiences of women, bypassed equally by philosophical and scientific traditions as well as by her contemporary colleagues in the phenomenological movement (Beauvoir 1949a, 32/29). By using the term “lived experience,” Beauvoir made it clear that her aim was to develop a foundational philosophical description of women’s experiences and the world as experienced by women. The second volume of Le deuxième sexe does exactly this. It gives us a wide variety of descriptions of women’s actions and passions, covering the areas of erotic life, marriage, motherhood, housekeeping, political life, and artistic creation. Beauvoir refers to the writings of female novelists and scientists as well as those of prostitutes. The sources are not presented as documents for sociological or historical inquiries, but introduced to make possible a philosophical investigation into the human body as it is experienced and lived in its feminine variation.

3. CONTINGENCY AND NECESSITY: TWO KINDS OF BODIES In the phenomenological framework, the difference between men and women may seem all-encompassing: human beings manifest two principal ways of being —the feminine and the masculine—and only these two. Beauvoir claims, however, that sexual differentiation is not necessary to our experience in the same way, or in the same sense, as mortality and embodiment are. We need to have a living body in order to exist and operate in the material world, and this body is necessarily finite. But it is not similarly necessary that there are two different types of bodies. We see this, Beauvoir argues, in the fact that it is easier to imagine “a society that reproduces parthenogenetically or consists of hermaphrodites” than to conceive of an immortal or disembodied human being (Beauvoir 1949a, 40/39). Sexual difference might be more deeply embedded in our experience of persons and human being than, for example, skin color or other “racial” differences. One could at least argue for this by pointing out that there are societies that do not distinguish between black and white, but there is no


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known culture that does not make the distinction between women and men. Nevertheless, Beauvoir seems to be right in insisting that not all experiences of persons, or even human persons, need to involve sexual differentation. In this context, Beauvoir also takes issue with Merleau-Ponty. At the end of the chapter on sexuality in his Phénoménologie de la perception, Merleau-Ponty argues that a sexless man is as inconceivable as a man without thoughts. He explains his position as follows: It will perhaps be objected that the organization of our body is contingent, that we can “conceive a man without hands, feet, head”18 and, even with a stronger reason, a sexless man, reproducing by cutting or layering. But this is true only if we take an abstract view of hands, feet, head or sexual apparatus, regarding them as fragments of matter [...] If on the other hand, we define man by his experience, that is to say, by his peculiar manner of giving form to the world [...] then a man without hands or without sexual system is as inconceivable as a man without thought (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 198/170).

Merleau-Ponty argues here that no part or capacity of the human body is more fundamental than the others. We can conceive of the body as a physical system composed of distinct parts—and we can treat the body as such a composite—but only if we take an external, third-person view of it. As long as we hold to our sense experiences and study the living body as it appears to us in vision and in touch, its hands and genitals appear to us in the same mode of evidence as its head. Beauvoir agrees that embodiment and sexuality are necessary aspects of human existence but for her Merleau-Ponty’s parallel of genitals and hands is gravely misleading. All normal human bodies have hands but not a similar or analogous “sexual apparatus.” The terms “sex organ” and “genital” are abstract terms that cover a number of concrete organs with different ranges of significance: the penis, the clitoris, the vagina, the breasts. None of these organs is necessary for a human being in the same sense as hands are, for the simple reason that there are two bodily norms for human embodiment: the masculine body and the feminine body. To describe the feminine body as a deviation from the masculine norm is, in Beauvoir’s understanding, to fall back on androcentric mythology (Beauvoir 1949a, 15/15). Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty both argue that sexuality is a basic structure of human existence, comparable to mortality. But Beauvoir criticizes Merleau-Ponty’s account for its abstractness: it bypasses the duality of our embodiment. She claims that if we really start our reflection on human beings from our own sense experiences, and focus our attention, then we must acknowledge that we are confronted not by one unified category but by two different types. These cannot be reduced one to the other but must be studied separately. Any philosophy or science that bypasses this duality and starts its inquiries from the level of “humanity in general” risks falling back on androcentric concepts and models. In order to

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avoid this bias and strive for the universal, one has to return to the particular and study it, once more, from the very beginning. Both Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty see Descartes in a double light: Both criticize Descartes for intellectualist prejudices, but both also agree that it is Descartes himself who provides the means for questioning all forms of Cartesianism, including the doctrine of the two substances. For Beauvoir as well as for Merleau-Ponty Descartes’ philosophy is rich with internal discordance and tensions. Descartes’ work promotes the natural scientific notion of the body, to be sure, but it also provides the basis for an independent experiential account that renders the body as an expressive unity. Merleau-Ponty’s critical dialogue with Descartes shows that the notion of the mind-body union can function as a basis for a philosophical reflection on sexuality and sexual difference. Beauvoir’s original and far-reaching invention was to develop these conceptual and methodic resources into a critical feminist investigation into the relationships between men and women.

NOTES 1

Elisabeth Grosz, for example, argues that “[i]nsofar as feminist theory uncritically takes over these common assumptions [of Cartesianism], it participates in the social devaluing of the body that goes hand in hand with the oppression of women” (1994, 10). Susan Hekman states – basing on a reading of Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva – that “the future of feminist theory lies in the rejection of the Cartesian subject” (1990, 92). 2 Cf. James 1997, Tollefsen 1999. 3 See also Irigaray 1984, Heinämaa 1999. 4 For a more detailed argument for the philosophical, phenomenological, relevance of Beauvoir’s discourse, see Heinämaa 2003b. 5 Merleau-Ponty finds support for his reading of Descartes from a number of earlier commentators, most importantly Malebranche. For this, see his lectures on the soul-body unity delivered in 1947-1948 (1997) and the later lectures on nature from 1956–1957 (1968). Another influence comes from Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology. Husserl focused on the problems of materiality and embodiment in his phenomenological inquiries already at the beginning of the century. Especially the second book of his Ideen (1952) was an important source for Merleau-Ponty, who studied it as a manuscript in the Husserl archive in Louvain. On this connection, see Heinämaa 2002, Toadvine 2002, Heinämaa 2003b. 6 For detailed commentaries of these passages, see Shapiro 1997, 1999b, Reuter 2000. 7 For an insightful discussion of this argument, see, Reuter 2000, 2004. 8 See, e.g., Irigaray’s Éthique de la différence sexuelle (1984), Seyla Benhabib’s Situating the Self: Gender, Community, and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics (1992), and Rosalyn Diprose’s The Bodies of Women: Ethics, Embodiment and Sexual Difference (1994). For a Spinozist alternative to the Cartesian approach, see the works of Elisabeth Grosz (1994), Genevieve Lloyd (1994), and Moira Gatens (1996). 9 For a more detailed argument, see Heinämaa 2003 a


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Merleau-Ponty argues that even though the leg is not objectively present, it still is given in sense experience as part of one’s own kinaesthetic, motor and tactile body (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 90–101/76–85). 11 Living bodies can be given to us also as mechanical systems of replaceable parts. However, such bodies are not objects of sense perception but grasped by the interplay of cognition, imagination, and abstraction. The sciences of life and psyche depend in their methods and results on this fundamental theoretical accomplishment. 12 The context makes clear that the desire at issue here is sexual. 13 By “modal” and “modality” I mean ways and manners of acting. Thus, these terms are not here restricted to their contemporary use in logic which focuses on the concepts of necessity and possibility. 14 For an argument in favor of a historical connection, see Heinämaa 2003b. 15 For a more detailed argument, see Heinämaa 1996, Heinamaa 2003b. 16 This is the usual reading, explicated most clearly by Judith Butler in Gender Trouble (1990, 6–12). For a detailed critique of it, see Heinämaa (1996, 28–31), (1997, 292–303). 17 For a more detailed argument against voluntaristic readings of Beauvoir’s feminism, see Heinämaa 1997. 18 The quote is from Pascal’s Pensées (1660), section VI.

REFERENCES Alanen, L. “Descartes and Elisabeth: A philosophical dialogue.” Unpublished manuscript, 2002. Alanen, L. Descartes’s Concept of Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. Beauvoir, S. de. Le deuxième sexe I: Les faits et les mythes. Paris: Gallimard, 1949a/1993. (In English The Second Sex, trans. and ed. H.M. Parshley. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987.) Beauvoir, S. de. Le deuxième sexe II: L’expérience vécue. Paris: Gallimard, 1949b/1991. (In English The Second Sex, trans. and ed. H.M. Parshley. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987.) Benhabib, S. “Epistemologies of postmodernism: A rejoinder to Jean-François Lyotard.” In L.J. Nicholson (ed.): Feminism/Postmodernism. New York and London: Routledge, 1990. Benhabib, S. Situating the Self: Gender, Community, and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics. London, New York: Routledge, 1992. Butler, J. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London, New York: Routledge, 1990. Descartes, R. Descartes René AT: Œuvres de Descartes, eds. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, revised edition, Paris: Vrin/C.N.R.S., [1964-1976] 1996. (In English CSM and CSM-K The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984-1991.) Diprose, R. The Bodies of Women: Ethics, Embodiment and Sexual Difference. London, New York: Routledge, 1994. Gatens, M. Imagining Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. Grosz, E. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994. Heinämaa, S. “Woman - nature, product, style?” In L. Hankinson Nelson and J. Nelson (eds.): Feminism, Science and the Philosophy of Science. Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer, 1996.

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Heinämaa, S. “What is a woman? Butler and Beauvoir on the foundations of the sexual difference.” Hypatia, 12:1, 1997, pp.20-39. Heinämaa, S. “Wonder and (sexual) difference: Cartesian radicalism in phenomenological thinking.” In T. Aho & M. Yrjönsuuri (eds.): Norms and Modes of Thinking in Descartes. Acta Philosophica Fennica 64. Helsinki, 1999. Heinämaa, S. “From decisions to passions: Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of Husserl’s reduction.” In T. Toadvine & L. Embree (eds.): Merleau-Ponty’s Reading of Husserl. Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer, 2002. Heinämaa, S. “The living body and its position in metaphysics: Merleau-Ponty’s dialogue with Descartes.” In Dan Zahavi, Sara Heinämaa, and Hans Ruin (eds.): Metaphysics, Facticity, Interpretation: Phenomenology in the Nordic Countries. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003a. Heinämaa, S. Towards a Phenomenology of Sexual Difference: Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir. Lanham, Boulder, New York, London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003b. Hekman, S. Gender and Knowledge: Elements of a Postmodern Feminism. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990. Husserl, E. Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Zweites Buch: Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution. Husserliana IV. Ed. M. Bimel. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1952. (In English Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer, Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989.) Irigaray, L. 1984. Éthique la différence sexuelle, Paris: Minuit, 1984. (In English An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. C. Burke and G. C. Gill. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993.) James, S. Passions and Actions: The Emotions in the Seventeenth-Century Philosophy. Oxford: Claredon Press, 1997. Lloyd, G.: Part of Nature: Self-Knowledge in Spinoza’s Ethics. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994. Merleau-Ponty, M. Phénoménologie de la perception. Paris: Gallimard, 1945/1993. (In English Phenomenology of Perception, trans. by C. Smith. New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1995.) Merleau-Ponty, M. Sens et non-sens. Paris: Gallimard, 1947/1995. (In English Sense and Non-Sense. Trans. by H. L. Dreyfus & P. A. Dreyfus. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964.) Merleau-Ponty, M. La Nature: Notes cours du Collège de France. Ed. by D. Séglard. Paris: Seuil, 1968/1994. Merleau-Ponty, M. L’union de l’âme et du corps: Chez Malbranche, Biran et Bergson, Notes prises au cours de Maurice Merleau-Ponty à l’École Normale Supérieure (1947–1948). Ed. by J. Deprun. Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1997. (In English The Incarnate Subject: Malebranche, Brian, and Bergson on the Union of Body and Soul, trans. by P. B. Milan. Ed. A. G. Bjelland Jr. and P. Burke. New York: Humanity Books, 2001.) Reuter, M. “Questions of sexual difference and equality in Descartes’ philosophy.” In T. Aho & M. Yrjönsuuri (eds.): Norms and Modes of Thinking in Descartes. Acta Philosophica Fennica 64. Helsinki, 1999. Reuter, M. Questions of the Body, Sexual Difference and Equality in Cartesian Philosophy, Doctoral dissertation. Department of Philosophy, University of Helsinki, 2000. Reuter, M. “Tensions and continuity: Merleau-Ponty on the history of philosophy.” Paper presented in the First Annual Meeting of the Nordic Society for Phenomenology, Helsinki, April 25–27, 2003. Reuter, M. “Psychologizing Cartesian doubt: Feminist reading strategies and the ‘unthought’ of philosophy.” In this volume, 2004.


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Shapiro, L. “Élisabeth et Descartes: La maladie, le remède et la nature féminine.” In E. Beranger, G. Castro, & M.-L. Paoli (eds.): Femme et nature. Bordeaux: Maison des Sciences de l’Homme d’Aquitaine, 1997. Shapiro, L. “Cartesian generosity.” In T. Aho & M. Yrjönsuuri (eds.): Norms and Modes of Thinking in Descartes. Acta Philosophica Fennica 64. Helsinki, 1999a. Shapiro, L. “Princess Elisabeth and Descartes: The union of soul and body and the practice of philosophy.” In G. Lloyd (ed.): Feminism and History of Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999b/2002. Toadvine, T. “Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Husserl.” In T. Toadvine & L. Embree (eds.): Merleau-Ponty’s Reading of Husserl. Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer, 2002. Tollefsen, D. “Princess Elisabeth and the problem of mind-body interaction.” Hypatia 14:3, 1999, 59–77.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PHILOSOPHY INTERPRETING LOCKE AND HUME

Anne J. Jacobson (University of Houston, U.S.A.)

The topic of a feminist engagement with past philosophy is very important and very difficult. On the one hand, to engage with past philosophy is to engage with an enterprise that has often consisted in research programs marked by the extreme narrowness of vision. Its practitioners were isolated from many dimensions of human life, and, consequently, at least in part neglectful of the social nature of human beings.1 On the other hand, simply to turn aside from the tradition is to ignore a still significant element of our culture. The accompanying topics, albeit perhaps seriously misconceived, are important to many feminist philosophers. One strategy with hard questions is to re-examine some of the basic approaches they have received. In the case of historical texts, the approaches are those that bear on and even eventually define the philosophical community’s conception of reading texts produced in the past. My intention in this essay is eventually to help shift our attention away from viewing philosophy texts as simply involving the interplay of ideas, and to enable us to see past texts more clearly as the products of the embodied psychological activity of their authors. Some at least of the historical texts can be very profitably viewed less as blinkered pursuits of misshaped research agenda and more as records of enquiries which clearly bear the marks of characteristically human thinking, thinking marked by goals and limits common to our species. Since, as we will see, such enquiries cannot be successful in terms of the goals commentators too often ascribe to them, it will also be important to rethink in what their philosophical success does consist.


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Many feminist historians have objected to a conception of philosophy that neglects the embodied nature of its production.2 The resulting critiques have often brought to the foreground the cultural locatedness of the typically male philosopher, rather than underlying and seemingly more physical characteristics. They have also at times developed psychoanalytic explications of the texts.3 My approach as developed in this paper, however, will differ from these approaches in two important ways. First of all, though human biology makes us deeply social and cultural creatures, some such features are not matters of cultural invention or convention. For example, though the Critique of Pure Reason is clearly a product of Kant’s cultural setting, the fact that it could not have been written in one sitting is not a matter of cultural option; human beings cannot produce such work without intervening periods of sleep. More generally, our material composition is not irrelevant to the cognitive activities characteristic of philosophy. We will be looking at some very simple but pervasive features of human psychology in order to see their effects on the production of texts. Secondly, I will not be employing a psychoanalytic approach. Commentary from the psychoanalytic tradition has enabled us to see, for example, how much in the way of theorizing requires highly selective attention, and it would be wrong to dismiss the important insights that have been achieved. However, there are a number of methodological problems with the approach, particularly its privileging of an observer as the one who really knows what is true.4 Part of what should be clear from the commentary developed below is that the features of the texts being discussed were not hidden from their producers, and it is later commentators who have neglected them, to their cost. It is also important in the present context to note that psychoanalytic theories tend to offer explanations in terms of our doing what we desire. We should be skeptical of the idea that we actually have the alternatives that psychoanalytic theories tend to see us as choosing among; part of many feminists’ concern with philosophy’s past is that the influence it can exert is one that restricts the alternatives subsequent practitioners can pursue. Given Western philosophy has traditionally been developed with an extreme narrowness of vision, it will have unfortunate features. We will focus on two such features, ones often thought to be characteristic of historical texts, and I will use our discussion of them to highlight two very standard readings of two philosophers, Locke and Hume. However, I am going to argue that the standard readings are mis-readings. One result of the discussion is to make us realize that our readings of historical texts tend to be the product not just of the texts themselves, but also the philosophical community’s views today about what professional philosophy should be like (and so what the great philosophy must be like), among other things. To say this is certainly not, of course, to say that the unfortunate features

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are not abundantly present; rather, we will be looking at mis-readings in order to see the fruitfulness of an approach that may mitigate the effects of a typically exclusionary tradition. I will, then, be recommending a different approach to the texts we will consider, one that sees them as instances of fallible human explorations rather than merely the vehicle for the display of seemingly all important ideas which can or do transcend their human limits. The texts so read can be seen to be more congenial in some ways to feminist values. I think it also allows a methodology which subverts some at least of the unwelcome influence we and our students become subject to if the texts are read simply in terms of the philosophical theses commentators find in them.

1. BACKGROUND There are many ways in which the texts from our philosophical past are problematic. These texts provide models, taxonomies and accounts of what are important philosophical questions that are so deeply influential that they appear centuries later to be the merest common sense. For example, today philosophers talk about “belief-desire folk psychology” as though there is a common sense view, present from pre-historic times, which anticipated Hume’s Eighteenth Century substitution of causal explanations for teleological ones.5 It is indeed hard to exaggerate the extent to which today’s agenda is fixed by our past. Jerry Fodor has recently remarked, “That’s what’s so nice about empiricist cognitive science: You can drop out for a couple of centuries and not miss a thing.”6 Fodor’s claim is based on the view that recently developed models that claim to be more biologically realistic constitute simply an elaboration of Hume’s theory of association. Of course, the similarities Fodor sees are accounted for, in part at least, by the fact that we read the past employing some of our own notions and attitudes; as I noted above, our readings of historical texts are in part the product of our values, and our ideas. At the same time, the fact remains that Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century theorists do promote an ontology of internal representational states that has very deeply affected the taxonomy adopted by many contemporary theorists in philosophy of mind and cognitive science more generally. In their explorations of the cultural situatedness of philosophy which we noted above, recent feminist historians have brought to our attention both the overt and the covert ways in which influential historical texts have a gendered agenda. While here again we may want to insist that the feminist readings are not themselves exempt from the possibility of distortion by the values of the commentators, the gendered agenda is often enough entirely

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explicit. Thus the texts may be overtly gendered by incorporating negative views about women or by giving women a negative position in their theories and recommendations. Though often unremarked, these comments are very striking and may in fact be signaling important conceptual shifts, particularly in their metaphorical guises. As Aaron Smuts has noticed, Hume’s metaphorical invocations of a female nature vary with his epistemic optimism.7 Though the female nature is a sexualized temptress “displaying herself,” when our ability to know is threatened, her appearance as a more benevolent mother provides a good reason in other contexts for thinking Hume is assessing the same situation more optimistically. As we are now well aware, it would be a mistake to think that sexism in philosophical texts is limited to the material that is overtly negative about women. Recent historians have also pointed out features that can be counted as enacting the sexist and exclusionary nature of philosophy as a social form.8 However, we need to be careful in describing the exclusion of women. To see this, let us consider treating a thesis about the human mind as historically and socially gendered. For example, the recent idea that socially disengaged computers, embodied in matter very different from that of our bodies, might present an adequate model of the human mind arguably has a setting in the centuries of thought preceding it. One of the precedents involves a picture of proper human activity as that which was in fact available almost solely to the highly privileged and isolated (and so male) thinker. This proper activity is the solving of problems that are theoretical at least in the sense that the solution depends, it is said, on thought alone. Simply to say that such philosophy is sexist or at least masculinist appears to assent to an identification of women with the body and the social, as opposed to the theoretical.9 It is the sort of position that has been (wrongly) understood as saying that women cannot be theoreticians. Further, it seems to judge a question about the computer as a model for the mind on grounds of social origins, a problematic twist. It is becoming a commonplace that the picture of human thought as at its best isolated from the social and the body, including the emotions and the senses, is a provably highly defective model, but the more convincing arguments for this do not appeal to its social origins.10 Social origins cannot, however, be dismissed as irrelevant; it is important that the character of philosophy is marked by shared characteristics of its producers. One consequence of this fact is that the human being who is ostensibly the subject of much of philosophical theorizing is an a-social and autonomous problem-solver and agent capable of attaining a god’s-eye view of eternal essences. A highly unrealistic view of human intellectual capacities is coupled with a nearly limitless ambition about the construction of theories and our ability to know. The two are, of


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course, connected: If we regard the material conditions of life as merely preventing us from performing at our best and we think we have identified an ability which transcends such limits, then we may well think there are no operating constraints on our ability to know if we engage just that ability.11 In ignoring the material dimensions of life, philosophy has re-enacted the exclusion of many dimensions of human life, not just those traditionally associated with women. Such philosophy might be called not just sexist, but also classist and racist.12 Such philosophy may not even mention what is being excluded; why focus on the exclusion of women? One thing such a focus might be doing is offering a somewhat psychoanalytic account of the cause of the general exclusion. Thus it might be said that the material aspects of life are denied because the philosopher wants to deny his relation with his mother, or some such. Or, it might be said, the philosopher is denying the more feminine side of his self in order to assert his masculinity. This is not the sort of account I am endorsing, as I explained at the beginning of the essay. Among the alternative phenomena with which a focus on the exclusion of women might be concerned are the ways in which gender itself plays an important role in the construction of the philosophical community, and thus in the positioning of philosophical ideas in the orders of importance. To do this would not be to exclude race and class as elements, but rather more simply to emphasize one kind of loss. We are used to the absence of women in most contexts of the historical production of culture, but it needs to be emphasized how much this exclusion is still taking place today. It is still too common, in academic and other professional contexts, to find markedly creative women positioned as merely disruptive outsiders. Once the exclusionary nature of philosophy has been noticed, a philosopher might well want to consider what a more inclusive philosophy could look like. The daunting task of so reconstructing philosophy will not be my focus here.13 Rather, the central concern is how as a feminist committed to inclusion one can read texts content of which must be severely partial. I have commented so far generally on the unrestricted ambition of the highly restricted and partial investigator into the nature of truth, beauty, knowledge and moral goodness. We will be focusing on two more specific features. The first feature is the theoretical individualism often consequent upon the theoretician’s conception of himself as genuinely independent of his social context: The second feature is the development of totalizing theories that the unrestricted ambition takes as its goal. However, our discussion of these features will have a complex structure. I will argue that if we look at texts more carefully as the result of human psychology, then we can see interesting ways in which some historical texts do not have these features. The point is this: Read less in terms of theses and more as products

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of human activity, some of the classical texts are less feminist unfriendly than we might think. My argument will be by example; that is, I will argue the case for certain aspects of the writings of Locke and Hume. The reader is most certainly invited to find similar rnisreadings of other historical figures. In the following two sections, we will look at the problematic features. My aim is two-fold. I will locate the aspects of the features we will be looking at. In addition, we will see how they have figured in interpretations of Locke and Hume. We will consider the features in terms of two flaws that are generated by thought with the feature. The first sort of flaw is philosophical and the second exegetical. After that, we will turn to alternative views of Locke and Hume.

2. FIRST PROBLEMATIC FEATURE The first problematic feature is the a-social characterization of human beings. This feature, Feature A, underlies two flaws that are of concern to us: The philosophical flaw, Flaw of constructing theories which assume the irrelevance of society to human beings, and the exegetical flaw, Flaw of assuming that an historical philosopher must also be presenting such a view. The a-social picture of the human being that is developed in much Western philosophy is not, at least at all directly, about sociability or conviviality.14 Rather, it is about whether human development and activities are independent of the presence of a society and engagement in social relations. For our purposes we can distinguish three dimensions along which it might be maintained that a social setting is at least theoretically not required: causal, constitutive and teleological. The classifications are not meant to present a finely grained schema; it is instead to allow us to see a kind of similarity between the kind of theory Locke is said to develop and others. One label we will use to encompass all the a-social views is “individualism.”15 In labeling a theory a-social in the causal dimension, I mean that it maintains that human beings are not causally dependent on a society or social relations. It may seem that few theories would maintain that human beings are always and at all times causally independent of society and social relations; early infancy is a stage of such helplessness that this seems impossible, even if we problematically discount gestation as not involving social relations. It may be, however, that the idea that a human person is essentially just a human soul is one such theory. We can understand the question of whether a theory is constitutively asocial as the question of whether the theory maintains that interactions with a society are a necessary condition for the distinctive or essential traits of a


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human being. Are such traits in some way profoundly relational, including or referring to some social dimension? So described, this dimension of individualism may seem vague, and it is. One way to reduce the vagueness is to look at actual claims. One claim that society is required is the claim that the content of our words depends on the practices in the society around us.16 A related claim might be that very important normative activities involved in having concepts depends on a society.17 Descartes is standardly interpreted as thinking that what is essential to the human self—being a thinking thing—has no logical connection with any other human being, and individualism of this sort is often called “Cartesianism.” A theory is teleologically individualistic when it holds that the point or purpose of human activities or conceptions is a-social. Many theories of knowledge are at least ostensibly teleologically a-social; that is, they give an account of knowledge in isolation from any of the social practices in which knowledge claims are significant. Feminists have given important criticisms of this view.18 A non-individualistic view need not fit neatly within the taxonomy I have given. For example, a rewarding interpretation of much of Wittgenstein would have him holding that what is teleologically social is actually also constitutive. Thus a Wittgensteinian so understood would hold that the idea that relatively inert and a-social computers might understand the essential core of language that we happen to use socially is radically mistaken about the nature of language.19 An example of a theory that is highly individualistic is the theory of personal identity that is often ascribed to Locke. I will be contesting this attribution later, so it is a good theory to use as an example of individualism. It is true that Locke’s initial discussion of personal identity invites an individualistic interpretation.20 There is no mention of anything other than one’s consciousness of one’s self. He says, “... (W)e must consider what person stands for; which, I think, is a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing in different times and places; which it does only by that consciousness which is inseparable from thinking, and, as it seems to me, essential to it” (E 2.27.9.)21 This is, as it were, the synchronic account of what a person is; that is, the account of what makes someone a person at some one time. 22 On this individualistic account, as Jonathan Bennett recounts it, Locke’s account of personal identity is an attempt to get a diachronic account of the continuation of a person or mind out of a synchronic account of a person stage or what a person is at some one time. A person stage is marked by unity of consciousness; the diachronic account uses what a person stage can remember as a way of getting an account of an enduring person. Behind this account is the idea that both consciousness and personal

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continuity are somehow basic facts for all of us who are not radically impaired. The account, we might say, is constitutively and teleologically a-social. Personal identity appears to be constituted by solipsistic self-reflection; all that is needed is self-consciousness and one’s own memory. It is teleologically a-social because, in so far as what is said goes, the account of the concept is not evaluated in any way having to do with society. That is, no mention is made of how this concept does or could fit into a social context in which, for example, it is important that the person blamed for doing one thing is the same person as the person who was punished at another time.

3. SECOND PROBLEMATIC FEATURE We will now look at the second problematic feature: the production of totalizing theories, Feature B. By this I mean the production of theories that purport to provide the one, true consistent and complete account of the nature of truth, beauty, knowledge and moral goodness, or some other central philosophical topic. As with the first feature, this problematic feature can lead to two flaws that are of interest to us: the philosophical flaw, Flaw of maintaining that all good, constructive philosophy must aim to produce totalizing theories and the exegetical flaw, Flaw of assuming all past philosophers had such goals. First some caveats: (1) Nothing I say should be understood as maintaining that all theories in all fields that purport to be complete and consistent are bad. Perhaps we will develop a complete and consistent physics, or theory of finite numbers; nothing in this paper is about the possibility or value of such things. (2) Nothing I say should be understood as maintaining that women cannot or should not be involved in such projects. Investigating natures or essences by investigating what is and is not contradictory is often the mark of an attempt to construct a totalizing theory. As Hume puts it, such investigations are often concerned with relations of ideas. That is, they aim to discern features of concepts or, to put it in the objective mode, they constitute non-empirical investigations of pervasive features of reality, such as truth, beauty, knowledge and moral goodness, mind, matter, and so on. The use of the principle of non-contradiction in the construction of theories is certainly present in Hume’s philosophy. For example, Hume’s argument that there are no abstract ideas invokes the principle: The confusion, in which impressions are sometimes involved, proceeds only from their faintness and unsteadiness, not from any capacity in the mind to receive any impression,


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which in its real existence has no particular degree nor proportion. That is a contradiction in terms; and even implies the flattest of all contradictions, viz. that it is possible for the same thing both to be and not to be. (Treatise, 19)23

Hume’s account of the nature of space (Treatise, 29) and time (Treatise, 31) similarly employ the principle of non-contradiction, as does Hume’s arguments for the nature of causation (e.g., Treatise, 79). When we look at Hume’s use of the principle of non-contradiction, he appears clearly to be the sort of philosopher for whom a totalizing theory is the goal: Philosophizing is the construction of consistent theories which delineate the nature or essence of important and pervasive features of reality; logical consistency is required; completeness is to be hoped for. It is useful to realize that not all philosophy has to be directed toward preserving this ideal. Indeed, I will argue below that Hume’s philosophy is emphatically not directed toward preserving consistency at all costs. Even more importantly in the present context, we should note that philosophy is in fact a human activity; the wisdom of not focusing on the principle of non-contradiction as the central touchstone may become more apparent if we think about how humans form beliefs and change their minds. If we adopted avoiding the possibility of inconsistency as the central imperative in forming beliefs, then it is very difficult to see how we could ever come to change our minds, since, at least on the face of it, we would be bound to exclude all evidence that would lead us to embrace something inconsistent with what we already believe. While a willingness to believe something inconsistent with what one believes now is not as such a willingness to believe at one time each of two inconsistent propositions, in practical human life belief change requires that we seriously entertain, quite possibly to the point of believing, propositions inconsistent with our other beliefs. Perhaps less obviously, there are very strong reasons, also grounded in human psychology, for thinking that the traditional project of providing the single, true analysis of the natures or concepts of the grand features are bound to fail. The reason is that unless we have fixed concepts with determinate contents, there cannot be any such completed analyses. But we do not, the evidence increasingly tells us, have such concepts. We have known since Quine that the project of providing analytic necessary and sufficient conditions is at best highly problematic. What more recent research does, in addition to confirming Quine’s insights, is to place in question whether we even have anything like generally shared stable beliefs which could provide the contents for such analyses.24 Rather, as Mark Johnson has argued, the application of concepts to varying situations is not dictated by some internal content and instead requires instead imaginative projection.25 What this means is that accounts which attempt, as philosophical accounts do, to say what the right and wrong uses of the concept are bound to fail.

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Penelope Deutscher has recently argued that contradiction holds in place traditional male philosophers’ views of women.26 In effect, the view I have been offering could generalize the point: the philosophical project may not be completeable and the contradictions we see in classical texts may be inevitable. Contradiction is too human to be utterly impermissible. A contradictory theory cannot be true, but an inconsistent text may still be valuable in many different ways, including its fruitfulness. A philosophical text is a working out of ideas and it is only if we lose sight of the “working out” aspect that we will be inclined to write out any inconsistency.

4. A DEFENSE OF LOCKE AND HUME In this section, I will propose a different reading of both Locke and Hume with respect to the problems we have been looking at. I will argue that neither is correctly interpreted in the terms we have seen so far. Locke’s account of personal identity, if indeed it is at all correct to speak of one such account, is not individualistic. Hume eschewed totalizing theories. 4.1 Locke While it is true that Locke’s discussion of personal identity seems in parts highly individualistic, there is another theme woven around this discussion and this is the theme of pain and pleasure. His first remark on personal identity in the Essay connects identity with pain and pleasure. He says, “For if we take wholly away all consciousness of our actions and sensations, especially of pleasure and pain, and the concernment that accompanies it, it will be hard to know wherein to place personal identity” (E 2.1.11). Once into the discussion of personal identity Locke says, “Self is that conscious thinking thing ...which is sensible, or conscious of pleasure and pain, capable of happiness or misery, and so is concerned for itself, as far as that consciousness extends” (E2.27.17). Now it is important to know that the only further references to pleasure and pain in the section on personal identity are to pleasure and pain as the effects of reward and punishment: This personality extends itself beyond present existence to what is past, only by consciousness, whereby it becomes concerned and accountable, owns and imputes to itself past actions, just upon the same ground, and for the same reason that it does the present. All which is founded in a concern for happiness, the unavoidable concomitant of consciousness; that which is conscious of pleasure and pain, desiring that that self that is conscious should be happy (E.II.27.26).

A concern for happiness, which here is about pleasure or pain, is what leads one to extend the personality beyond the present. How could a


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concern for pleasure or pain do that? It does that because the pleasure and pain in question are matters of reward and punishment and so are directly related to the question of what actions one is responsible for, or “owns.” As Locke goes on to say, And therefore whatever past actions it cannot reconcile or appropriate to that present self by consciousness, it can be no more concerned in, than if they had never been done: And to receive pleasure or pain, i.e. reward or punishment... (E.II.27.26).

This appears to make it the case that the concern for happiness and pleasure which grounds the self-ascription of actions is founded on external—and social—practices of rewarding (and, of course, punishing). The practices must be social, because one is not going to start off rewarding and punishing oneself. To see this, we need to remember that, for Locke, specific moral rules are not innate; self-blame and self-punishment are of course possible, but one is not going to have the moral principles with which to do this all by one’s self. In so far as the notion or sense one has of self and identity goes, then, if it involves pain and pleasure in its origins, it will involve society with laws and rewards and punishment. As Locke said at the beginning of the passages in #26 we have been looking at, “Person, as I take it, is the name for this self. Wherever a man finds what he calls himself, there I think another may say is the same person. It is a forensick term appropriating actions and their merit; and so belongs only to intelligent agents capable of a law, and happiness and misery,” (E.2.27.26). Locke’s discussion replaces a sense of ourselves as eternal substances with a sense of us as members of a moral society. Such a reading seems confirmed by the contemporaneous A Defence of Mr. Locke’s Opinion concerning Personal Identity 27 Now the word person ... is properly a forensic term, and here to be used in the strict forensic sense, denoting some such quality or modification in man as denominates him a moral agent, or an accountable creature; renders him the proper subject of laws, and a true object of rewards or punishments. (Vol. III, 179.)

Correspondingly, That property then, or quality... which... renders men “sensible that they are the same” in some respects, is ... in the legal, and in common sense, that which so far makes them [capable] of being ranked among moral, social creatures, and of being treated accordingly, for several obvious purposes in social life. (Vol. III, 191)

The Locke revealed in these passages is almost entirely absent from the commentators. Of course, many commentators have noticed the role of appropriation in Locke’s account of person, but the role of society in creating the appropriation has been neglected.28 To be a person is to be a

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member of a moral community. Thus Locke’s account is non-individualistic causally, constitutively and teleologically. On this account account, the memory claims regarding actions which are owned and which partially constitute personal identity are in fact in our repertoire only because of our training in a society, and this training affects both the content of the conception and its point; indeed, the conception is to be explained in terms of its point.

4.2 Hume Just as Locke’s account can be seen as quite contrary to that standardly ascribed to him, so also Hume’s philosophy positively resists the totalizing that is too often attributed to him. With Hume I will be brief because I am merely going to add to a picture of his texts I have been developing in a number of articles.29 According to the picture I am developing, Hume occupies incompatible positions in his texts and there is no sound textual basis for adjudicating among them and choosing one as the position Hume really endorses. What we find instead is a multiplicity of perspectives, some of which Hume himself occupies at sometimes and disowns at others. The multiplicity of perspectives also infects the language Hume uses, so that, for example, “constant conjunction” and “necessary connexion” are both best interpreted as having shifting implications within Hume Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.30 One such perspective we can think of as that of the critical philosopher and another as that of the empirical scientist. The empirical scientist firmly believes in the existence of an external world. This perspective yields the position that we cannot doubt the existence of matter. As Hume tells us, “We may well ask, What causes induce us to believe in the existence of body? but it is in vain to ask, Whether there be body or not? That is a point which we must take for granted in all our reasonings.”31 However, another perspective, which arises as Hume investigates the first, clearly intrudes. That is, the investigations conducted by the empirical scientist lead to the second. This second perspective certainly does not find that we cannot question the existence of body: Having thus given an account of all the systems, both popular and philosophical, with regard to external existences, I cannot forbear giving vent to a certain sentiment which arises upon reviewing those systems. I begun this subject with premising that we ought to have an implicit faith in our senses, and that this would be the conclusion I should draw from the whole of my reasoning. But to be ingenuous, I feel myself at present of a quite contrary sentiment, and am more inclined to repose no faith at all in my senses, or rather imagination, than to place in it such an implicit confidence. I cannot conceive how such trivial qualities of the fancy, conducted by such false suppositions, can ever lead to any solid and rational system. (Treatise, 217.)


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The only way out of the critical perspective is, Hume’s says, to suspend criticism and give in to carelessness and neglect. Hume tells us that sceptical doubt arises naturally from profound reflecting. Further, the solution to the sceptical doubt is NOT to try to solve or resolve it. That simply makes things worse. All that one can do is to leave it and walk away. Hume’s texts contain a mixture of a commitment to a science of human nature that presents us as knowing beings in a physical world and moments of great scepticism. Hume has a very considerable awareness of the dialectic of human thought. The emphasized words in the passage immediately below, which contains his general reflections on scepticism regarding body, make it clear the extent to which for Hume philosophy does not consist in working out the one true and complete answer: This sceptical doubt, both with respect to reason and the senses, is a malady which can never be radically cured, but must return upon us every moment, however we may chase it away, and sometimes may seem entirely free from it. It is impossible, upon any system, to defend either our understanding or senses; and we but expose them further when we endeavour to justify them in that manner. As the sceptical doubt arises naturally from a profound and intense reflection on those subjects, it always encreases the further we carry our reflections, whether in opposition or conformity to it. Carelessness and inattention alone can afford us any remedy. For this reason I rely entirely upon them; and take it for granted, whatever may be the reader’s opinion at this present moment, that an hour hence he will be persuaded there is both an external and internal world.... (Treatise, 218; all emphasis mine.)

5. ON READING THE TEXTS There are problems with Western Philosophy and these are acute from a feminist point of view. Historical texts are read for ideas that have been developed by people leading lives of high privilege and great isolation. It is inevitable that the ideas bear marks of this isolation and virtually certain that immersion in such ideas will influence the way one thinks oneself. Once we look at the texture of the texts, however, it appears we may have been misled about what is really going on in at least some of them. What we have seen of Locke and Hume bears this thought out. Far from attempting to present the one true theory about personal identity or our knowledge of the external world, Locke’s and Hume’s texts present us with philosophers bringing in various perspectives on very puzzling issues. Locke’s discussions of personal identity respond at one point to issues about the doctrine of an immortal soul and, at another point, to issues about civic responsibility. Hume presents us with a number of different perspectives; there is no textual foundation for insisting that he himself occupies one and only one of them.

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Recent postmodern approaches to philosophy, particularly those of a deconstructive nature, have tended to ferret out contradictions as evidence of a subversion of the text’s professed message. There is a different way to see inconsistency. It is to take it as showing that the idea that there is a univocally professed message is itself questionable. There are very strong psychological reasons for thinking that a multiply perspectival text is in better accord with human intellectual capacities. It was, of course, Hume more than any other analytic philosopher, who was aware of the tensions and conflicts in human thought: Thus our general rules are in a manner set in opposition to each other. [Example] ... Here is the first influence of general rules. [Example]... This is a second influence of general rules, and implies the condemnation of the former. Sometimes the one, sometimes the other prevails, according to the disposition and character of the person. The vulgar are commonly guided by the first, and wise men by the second. Mean while the sceptics may here have the pleasure of observing a new and signal contradiction in our reason, and of seeing all philosophy ready to be subverted by a principle of human nature, and again saved by a new direction of the very same principle. The following of general rules is a very unphilosophical species of probability; and yet it is only by following them that we can correct this, and all other unphilosophical probabilities. (Treatise, 149.)

6. CONCLUSION In this paper I have tried to further the legitimization of a psychological approach to the historical texts. Rather than treating texts merely as the sites for great ideas, we have been looking at the texts as records of intellectual struggle on the part of fallible human beings doomed to fail unless we come to understand the success of philosophy in more human terms. A transcendent inquiry into the nature of truth, beauty and goodness is almost certainly beyond us. This is so not because of the difficulty of such an inquiry or because of the hidden nature of the subjects, but rather because the subjects do not exist. Perhaps an account of beauty or goodness could be so compelling that it commands assent, but this will not be because truth is uncovered; rather, it will be because the account creates an agreement, a way of going on. There are good reasons to want to read and to teach past philosophical texts. Among other things, doing so can be instrumental in creating opportunities for new voices and new perspectives on problems that are important in our culture. To read past texts as records of human endeavors helps us to see that there is both a lot more in the texts, and a lot less, than traditional conceptions of philosophy lead us to expect or want. I have not so far attempted to address the still more difficult question of how we might reconceive of philosophical success. However, there is an


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obvious extension of the arguments above in this direction. Given the picture of concepts we saw above, philosophical reflection might still give us the creative exploration of ways to project from clear and central uses of concepts to future other less obvious ones, and rationales for doing so, including rationales for revisionary projections in the light of new ways of proceeding in other disciplines. At least one factor in doing this successfully, the model of Locke and Hume strongly suggest, is the ability to bring in diverse perspectives and new points of view. Doing so need not, it should be said, end up providing us with a purportedly consistent and complete answer to the questions asked, an answer from a theory which could have been produced by a creature of an entirely different species or kind.32

NOTES 1

It is impossible to do justice in a single footnote to the many ways in which feminists have successfully explored this theme. Someone unfamiliar with this tradition of criticism could happily start with the Re-Reading the Canon series edited by Nancy Tuana for Penn State Press. 2 The important works include the now classic by Genevieve Lloyd, The Man of Reason: ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ in Western Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984); Ed (London and New York: Routledge, 1993). The other feminist texts mentioned below similarly challenge philosophy’s self-conception of a culturally independent objectivity. 3 See, for example, Susan R. Bordo, The Flight to Objectivity: Essays on Cartesianism and Culture (Albany: SUNY Press, 1987) and Jane Flax, “Political Philosophy and the Patriarchal Unconscious: A Psychoanalytical Perspective on Epistemology and Metaphysics,” in Sandra Harding and Merrill B. Hintikka, Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1983). In Engenderings: Constructions of Knowledge, Authority, and Privilege (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 7, Naomi Scheman notes that the objects of such analyses are at least often the personas in the texts rather than the historical philosophers. 4 For an argument against this feature, see my “The Soul Unto Itself: Self-Knowledge and a Science of the Mind,” Aerobase, 2000. 5 See Paul M Churchland, “Folk Psychology and the Explanation of Human Behavior” and Myles Brand, “Proximate Causation of Action,” both in Philosophical Perspectives, 3: Philosophy of Mind and Action Theory, Villanueva, Enrique (ed) (Atascadero: Ridgeview, 1989). The Humean origins are correctly described in Michael Smith, “The Humean Theory of Motivation,” Mind, 1987; 96, 36-61. I have argued against the Humean understanding of ordinary explanations in a number of recent publications including “The Soul Unto Itself and “A Problem for Causal Accounts of Reasons and Rationalizations,” Southern Journal of Philosophy, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, 1993, pp. 307-321. 6 Jerry Fodor, The Mind Doesn’t Work That Way : The Scope And Limits Of Computational Psychology (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000). 7 Aaron A. Smuts, “The Metaphorics of Hume’s Gendered Skepticism” Feminist Interpretations of Hume, Anne Jaap Jacobson, ed (College Park: Penn State Press, 2000).

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For example, the French philosophers LeDoeuff, Kofman and Irigaray focus “on the constancy with which women have been figured as ‘other’ in the history of philosophy.” Penelope Deutscher, Yielding Gender: Feminism, Deconstruction And The History Of Philosophy (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 76. 9 As Lloyd points out, Descartes’ disassociation of reason from the emotional and sensuous was not explicitly gendered, but it occurred in a context when the related gendered associations were quite standard. Her making such a claim does not, of course, constitute an endorsement of the associations and Lloyd is at pains to disassociate herself from such an endorsement in the second edition of her classic. A recent argument that such binary disassociations may be more grounded in universal human experience can be found in Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, “Binary Opposition As an Ordering Principle of (Male?) Human Thought” in “Feminist Phenomenology”, Linda Fisher ed. (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publisher, 2000). 10 See Antonio R. Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, And The Human Brain, (New York : G.P. Putnam,1994). The claim regarding the importance of emotion to reason was made by many feminist philosophers prior to him; see my “Reconceiving Reason and Writing the Philosophical Canon,” in Feminist Interpretations of Hume. 11 See Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991). 12 See Bell Hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1990) 13 On the need for such a reconstruction, see, among many others, the classic essay by Maria C Lugones and Elizabeth V Spelman, “Have We Got a Theory for You: Feminist theory, Cultural Imperialism and the Demand for ‘The Woman’s Voice’,” Hypatia, WSIF 1, 573581. 14 Peter Machamer interestingly links an a-social view about knowledge with the entrepreneurial ego in creating the Century ideal of the scientific method. See his “The Concept of the Individual and the Idea(I) of Method in Seventeenth-Century Natural Philosophy” in Scientific Controversies: Philosophical and Historical Perspectives, Machamer, Peter (ed) (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). 15 There are, in addition, kinds of individualism which we will not even consider. See Mario Bunge, “Ten Modes of Individualism--None of Which Works--And Their Alternatives,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 2000; 30(3), 384-406. 16 For early anti-individualistic claims in this vein, see Putnam, H. (1975). Mind, Language, and Reality. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Burge, T. (1979). Individualism and the mental. Midwest Studies in Philosophy IV: Studies in Metaphysics. P. French, et al. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press. 17 See Saul A. Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1982).. 18 Lorraine Code, Epistemic Responsibility (Hanover: University Press New-England, 1987). 19 I am particularly indebted here to discussions with Rupert Read. 20 This individualistic interpretation is standard and treated as such in Raymond Martin and John Barresi, Naturalization of the Soul: Self and Personal Identity in the Eighteenth Century (London and New York: Routledge, 2000). 21 An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Vol. I of The Works of John Locke, 12th edition, London: Printed for C. and J. Rivington, etc., 1824. 22 Jonathan Bennett, “Locke’s Philosophy of Mind,” The Cambridge Companion to Locke, Chappell, Vere (ed) (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 23 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Second Edition, P.H. Nidditch ed (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978). 24 Concepts : Core Readings, Eric Margolis and Stephen Laurence eds (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999).


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25

Mark Johnson, Moral Imagination : Implications Of Cognitive Science For Ethics (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1993). 26 Penelope Deutscher, Yielding Gender : Feminism, Deconstruction, And The History Of Philosophy (London and New York : Routledge, 1997). 27 From Vol. III of The Works of John Locke, 179-199. 28 See Michael Ayers, Locke: Epistemology & Ontology (London and New York: Routledge, 1993, 266-68 of Vol. II. 29 See “Reconceiving Reason and Writing the Philosophical Canon,” and “What did Hume Really Say? Cognitive Science in a PostCartesian Text,” The New Hume, Rupert Read and Ken Taylor eds, (London: Routledge, 2000). 30 Ed by Selby-Bigge, revised by Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976). 31 Treatise, 187 32 I am very indebted to the several people who took the time to offer comments on earlier versions of this paper. I am especially grateful to Susan Martinelli-Fernandez whose extensive and detailed comments were invaluable.

REFERENCES Ayers, Michael. Locke: Epistemology & Ontology. London and New York: Routledge, 1993. Bennett, Jonathan. “Locke’s Philosophy of Mind.” The Cambridge Companion to Locke, edited by Vere Chappell. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Bordo, Susan R. The Flight to Objectivity: Essays on Cartesianism and Culture. Albany: SUNY Press, 1987. Brand, Myles. “Proximate Causation of Action.” Philosophical Perspectives, 3: Philosophy of Mind and Action Theory, edited by Enrique Villanueva. Atascadero: Ridgeview, 1989. Bunge, Mario. ‘Ten Modes of Individualism—None of Which Works—And Their Alternatives.” Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 2000; 30(3), 384-406. Burge, Tyler. “Individualism and the Mental.” Midwest Studies in Philosophy IV: Studies in Metaphysics, edited by P. French et al. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1979. Churchland, Paul M. “Folk Psychology and the Explanation of Human Behavior.” Philosophical Perspectives, 3: Philosophy of Mind and Action Theory, edited by Enrique Villanueva. Atascadero: Ridgeview, 1989. Code, Lorraine. Epistemic Responsibility. Hanover: University Press New-England, 1987. Damasio, Antonio R. Descartes’ Error : Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York : G.P. Putnam,1994. Deutscher, Penelope. Yielding Gender: Feminism, Deconstruction and The History of Philosophy. London and New York: Routledge, 1997. Flax, Jane. “Political Philosophy and the Patriarchal Unconscious: A Psychoanalytical Perspective on Epistemology and Metaphysics.” In Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science, edited by Sandra Harding and Merrill B. Hintikka. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1983. Fodor, Jerry. The Mind Doesn’t Work That Way : The Scope and Limits of Computational Psychology. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000. Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991. Hooks, Bell. Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. Boston: South End Press, 1990. Hume, David. Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and the Principles of Morals, edited by Selby-Bigge, revised by P. H. Nidditch. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976.

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Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature, Second Edition, edited by P.H. Nidditch. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978. Jacobson, Anne Jaap, ed. Feminist Interpretations of Hume. College Park: Penn State Press, 2000. Jacobson, Anne Jaap. “Reconceiving Reason and Writing the Philosophical Canon.” In Feminist Interpretations. Jacobson, Anne Jaap, ed. Feminist Interpretations of Hume. College Park: Penn State Press, 2000. Jacobson, Anne Jaap. “What Did Hume Really Say? Cognitive Science in a PostCartesian Text.” The New Hume, edited by Rupert Read and Ken Taylor. London: Routledge, 2000. Jacobson, Anne Jaap. “The Soul Unto Itself: Self-Knowledge and a Science of the Mind.” Aerobase, 2000. Jacobson, Anne Jaap. “A Problem for Causal Accounts of Reasons and Rationalizations.” Southern Journal of Philosophy, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, 1993, pp. 307-321. Johnson, Mark. Moral Imagination : Implications Of Cognitive Science For Ethics. Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1993. Kripke, Saul A. Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1982. Locke, John. The Works of John Locke, 12th edition, London: Printed for C. and J. Rivington, etc., 1824. Lloyd, Genevieve. The Man of Reason: ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ in Western Philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Ed London and New York: Routledge, 1993.) Lugones, Maria C. and Elizabeth V. Spelman. “Have We Got a Theory for You: Feminist Theory, Cultural Imperialism and the Demand for ‘The Woman’s Voice’.” Hypatia, WSIF 1, 573-581. Machamer, Peter. “The Concept of the Individual and the Idea(I) of Method in SeventeenthCentury Natural Philosophy.” In Scientific Controversies: Philosophical and Historical Perspectives, edited by Peter Machamer. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Margolis, Eric and Stephen Laurence, eds. Concepts : Core Readings. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999. Martin, Raymond and John Barresi. Naturalization of the Soul: Self and Personal Identity in the Eighteenth Century. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Putnam, Hilary. Mind, Language, and Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975. Scheman, Naomi. Engenderings: Constructions of Knowledge, Authority, and Privilege. London and New York: Routledge, 1993. Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine. “Binary Opposition As an Ordering Principle of (Male?) Human Thought.” In Feminist Phenomenology, edited by Linda Fisher. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publisher, 2000. Smith, Michael. “The Humean Theory of Motivation.” Mind, 1987; 96, 36-61. Smuts, Aaron A. “The Metaphorics of Hume’s Gendered Skepticism.” In Feminist Interpretations of Hume, edited by Anne Jaap Jacobson. College Park: Penn State Press, 2000.

HUME AS MAN OF REASON AND WOMAN’S PHILOSOPHER

Don Garrett (New York University, U.S.A.)

Methodological feminism in philosophy—the attempt to utilize feminist insights, issues, and concerns in the pursuit of philosophical knowledge and understanding—can benefit the history of philosophy—the attempt to understand philosophy’s past—in at least four different ways. First, it can suggest new questions to ask and new resources to use in trying to understand the historical context in which a philosophical work was produced. Second, it can furnish a different and distinctive perspective from which to read historical philosophical texts, thereby making it more likely that their interpretation will not be merely partial or one-sided. Third, it can provide tools of criticism with which to evaluate the adequacy of the philosophical theories and arguments that an interpretation reveals. Fourth, it can show how to apply the philosophy of a past writer to philosophical issues of contemporary significance—not only gender issues specifically, but also the many philosophical issues with which gender issues intersect— in ways that can increase the value of the entire historical undertaking. One recent case in which methodological feminism has proven very productive in the history of philosophy is that of Hume’s treatment of reason. In the course of his published writings, David Hume makes dozens of claims about reason. Yet it remains a controversial question what Hume’s attitude toward reason is, and even what he means by the very term ‘reason’. Like many other topics in Hume’s philosophy, however, Hume’s treatment of reason has been fruitfully informed by recent feminist writings. Genevieve Lloyd, in her 1984 book entitled The Man of Reason: “Male” and “Female” in Western Philosophy, was a pioneer in addressing Hume’s treatment of reason from a feminist perspective. More recently, Annette Baier—who was the first writer to raise the question of Hume’s claim to be 171 L. Alanen and C. Witt (eds.), Feminist Reflections on the History of Philosophy, 171-192. © 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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a “women’s philosopher”—has made his treatment of reason one central focus of her attention. I will begin by briefly describing some of the history of feminist writing on Hume, introducing three recent essays—by Baier, Lloyd, and Anne Jaap Jacobson—that bear specifically on Hume’s treatment of reason. I will then highlight some interpretative claims made in these three essays that I believe to be both correct and important, and I will describe three further interpretive claims that I believe constitute understandable misinterpretations of Hume. Next, I will give my reasons for disputing these three interpretive claims and explain how my reading of Hume differs from those of Baier, Lloyd, and Jacobsen. Finally, I will argue that interpreting Hume in the way I propose actually renders his theory of reason more, rather than less, congenial to important feminist aims.

1. HUME’S TREATMENT OF REASON IN RECENT FEMINIST WRITING In the first paragraph of her 1987 essay, “Hume, the Women’s Moral Theorist?”1 Annette Baier remarked that “Hume’s writings have not met with a very positive reception from contemporary feminists” (52). She candidly noted some of the reasons: They fix on his references to the “fair” and the “weak and pious sex” and on his defense in the essay “The Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences” of the claim that male gallantry is as natural a virtue as respect for one’s elders, both being ways of generously allaying others’ well-founded sense of inferiority or infirmity: “As nature has given man the strength above women, by endowing him with greater strength of mind and body, it is his part to alleviate that superiority, as much as possible, by a studied deference and complaisance for all her inclinations and opinions. (52)

Baier displayed a parallel generosity of her own toward Hume—in this case, the generosity of a thinker possessing the natural advantages of a later and more inclusive perspective toward a thinker whose earlier and less inclusive perspective naturally constitutes a kind of inferiority or infirmity—for she returned at the end of the essay to characterize what she called “Hume’s apparently sexist remarks” as at least potentially “harmless” products of his “social realism” about the actual status of women in the society in which he lived.2 Baier’s primary purpose, however, was not to judge the relative sexism of Hume’s various statements about women but rather to argue that his moral theory squares, in many crucial respects, far better than does Kant’s moral theory with the moral wisdom of (many) women; she thereby implicitly answered the query of her title—“Hume, the Women’s Moral Theorist?”—with at least a qualified “yes.” In doing so,


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she also helped to stimulate an ongoing and fruitful conversation between and about feminism and Humean philosophy. Baier’s 1987 article was followed in 1991 by her landmark book, A Progress of Sentiments: Reflections on Hume’s Treatise.3 One of its central themes, already broached in the earlier article, was the normative power of “reflection” or reflexivity—that is, of the turning of the mind’s faculties onto their own operations; particularly important in Baier’s interpretation of Humean normativity was the notion of a “review of the whole mind by the whole mind” that would allow the mind to “bear its own survey.” Another central theme was the crucial importance of rich human social interaction to Hume’s thinking throughout all three books of A Treatise of Human Nature4—“Of the understanding,” “Of the passions,” and “Of morals.” A third central theme was the essential continuity of the Treatise, which demands that later parts be read in the light of earlier parts, and vice versa, in such a way as to engage the reader in a “progress of sentiments.” These three themes naturally suggested to many readers the possibility of an epistemological companion piece to Baier’s “Hume, the Women’s Moral Theorist?” Clearly, they also suggested such a prospect to Baier herself, for her essay “Hume, the Reflective Women’s Epistemologist?”5—in which she memorably pronounced the Scottish outsider Hume an “unwitting virtual woman”—appeared two years later, in 1993. “Hume, the Reflective Women’s Epistemologist?” helped to stimulate yet further conversation about the relation between feminism and Hume, and it thus fittingly serves as the first essay in Feminist Interpretations of David Hume, a recent collection of essays edited by Anne Jaap Jacobson.6 In her introduction to the collection, Jacobson writes that “readers are very much invited into the resulting conversation ... by evaluating one author’s perspective, reconciling or adjudicating among conflicting views, and generalizing an author’s approach” (5). I propose to take up Jacobson’s invitation, doing a bit of each—evaluating, adjudicating, reconciling, and generalizing. The collection contains thirteen fine essays in all, representing a wide range of topics, but I will focus on Hume’s treatment of reason as it is discussed in three of them: Baier’s “Hume, the Reflective Women’s Epistemologist?” Genevieve Lloyd’s “Hume on the Passion for Truth,” and Anne Jaap Jacobson’s “Reconceptualizing Reasoning and Writing the Philosophical Canon: The Case of David Hume.” There is much that is both appealing and compelling in each of these essays. For example, Baier is surely right to characterize Hume as “naturalizing reason.” She redresses a serious historical imbalance by emphasizing the central role that Hume ascribes to social and cultural forces in the pursuit of human knowledge, including the need to have one’s opinions seconded by others and the power of political arrangements to encourage or hinder the kind of free inquiry that is required for philosophy

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and the sciences. She observes that Hume opposes many different “tyrannies”—that of husbands over wives, that of absolute monarchs over subjects, and that of “radical usurpers over human reason”—and she argues that Hume sees all of these tyrannies as interrelated. Lloyd seconds Baier’s characterization of Hume as “naturalizing reason,” and she praises Baier’s emphasis on the importance that Hume attaches to achieving a satisfactory “review of the whole mind by the whole mind.” She argues that Hume’s psychology integrates “intellect, emotion, and imagination” in such a way as to break down assumed polarities between reason and its supposed opposites. One of Lloyd’s chief cases in point is the way in which Hume’s doctrine of the motivational inertness of “reason alone” leads him to locate the natural human motivation to engage in reasoning in a separate passion, “curiosity, or the love of truth”—a passion that is affected by the imagination in much the same way as are the passions for hunting and gaming. As Lloyd notes, this makes reason dependent in its operations on both passion and imagination. She also remarks on the importance to Hume of what I have elsewhere7 called his “Title Principle,” which he states in the final section of Book 1 of the Treatise: “Where reason is lively, and mixes itself with some propensity, it ought to be assented to. Where it does not, it can have no title to operate on us.” She astutely observes that “curiosity, or love of truth” holds parallel places of honor in the first two Books of Hume’s Treatise, helping to rescue reason from “indolence and spleen” in the final section of Book I and emerging for discussion in its own right in the final section of Book 2. Jacobson argues in her introduction to the volume that Hume’s project makes him a “constructive” philosopher, rather than the purely negative or destructive one that early interpreters often took him to be; and in her main essay, she rightly observes more specifically that “Hume’s science of human nature is at least a precursor of today’s cognitive science” (66). As she emphasizes, this makes his philosophy, like contemporary cognitive science itself, of potentially major significance to feminism. Nevertheless, each of these essays also contains at least one claim about Hume’s treatment of reason that I think will not withstand closer scrutiny. To take the first example, Baier writes in her concluding paragraph that “Hume uses the word reason in shifting senses” (36). More specifically, she takes him to begin with a narrow, “Cartesian” sense of reason as “the faculty of intellectual intuition and demonstration.”8 This, she holds, is the sense of ‘reason’ that Hume intends when he states his famous conclusion about induction in Treatise 1.3.6.12—namely, that inferences from experience are “not determin’d by reason.” After reaching this famous conclusion, she maintains, Hume then extends the sense of the term ‘reason’ for the remainder of Book 1 of the Treatise “to include our deductive and inductive thought moves” (emphasis added). In Book 2,


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according to Baier, the sense of the term ‘reason’ becomes even further enlarged or “animated” to allow reason to include (and even to “become”) the love of truth. Finally, in Book 3, Humean reason on Baier’s account “comes to include also our capacity to coordinate our speaking and our actions with the speech and action of our fellows, to coordinate moral and aesthetic judgments as well as factual and mathematical ones” (36). I am convinced, in contrast, that Hume uses the term ‘reason’ entirely univocally throughout his writings, to designate the inferential (i.e., inference-making) faculty, a faculty that he consistently takes to operate in two different modes—“demonstrative” reasoning (which concerns mathematics and other relations of ideas, and results in the knowledge of relations whose denial would be inconceivable and would imply a contradiction) and (what he calls, following Locke) “probable” reasoning. At no point, as I read him, does he either limit the scope of reason to demonstrative or deductive reasoning or expand it to include passions or other capacities. In saying this, I am of course taking up the first part of Jacobson’s invitation in her editorial introduction, by evaluating the truth of one of Baier’s claims. But I am at the same time seeking to take up the second part of the invitation as well, by attempting to do some adjudicating in favor of Lloyd. For while Lloyd sees Hume as breaking down oppositions of reason to passion (and also to imagination) and writes of Hume’s “transformation of reason,” she quite clearly interprets him as retaining reason and passion as distinct parts or aspects of a unified structure of mind, so that reason does not literally come to include (or become) the “love of truth.” Yet whereas Baier’s interpretation makes Humean reason more inclusive than it really is, Lloyd, in turn, seems to make Humean reason less inclusive than it really is. For she writes, concerning Hume’s treatment of probable inference, that “the quality by which the mind ‘enlivens’ some ideas beyond others has now nothing to do with reason” (43), and that “knowledge [of “matters of fact” by “probable inference”] is the work of imagination rather than reason” (43-44; emphasis added).9 I believe, on the contrary, that Hume consistently regards probable inference as having a great deal to do with reason—in fact, he believes it is by far the most common way in which human reason exerts itself. Finally, although Jacobson characterizes Hume as a “constructive” philosopher, her essay also claims that he at least sometimes goes so far as to reject the normative demand for consistency. Thus, she writes: Hume, I shall argue, at times even explicitly rejects the goal of arriving at consistent answers to the questions addressed. On the account I shall give, it is wrong to ask what Hume really thought, if the answer to that question is supposed to supply the consistent answers to the important questions raised. (61)

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Again, according to Jacobson, “he asserts as true and unproblematic statements that he also says are false or irrational” (75). As I read Hume, however, he always seeks consistent answers to the questions he raises, and he never intentionally asserts inconsistencies. In reading Hume in this way, I am, of course, evaluating the truth of Jacobson’s claim to the contrary, but I am also attempting to adjudicate the question of Hume’s consistency in favor of Baier, who wrote in the final chapter of A Progress of Sentiments that, for Hume, “absence of contradiction is reason’s minimal demand” (277).

2. THREE CLAIMS ABOUT HUMEAN REASON Baier asserts that “Hume uses the word reason in shifting senses”; and, as she indicates in A Progress of Sentiments, she holds that the first of these shifts occurs midway through Book 1of the Treatise, following Hume’s famous argument concerning “inferences from experience” or “probable inferences”—what we would call “inductive inferences”—in A Treatise of Human Nature 1.3.6. In and prior to this section, according to Baier, Hume uses a narrow “Cartesian” sense of ‘reason’, denoting only demonstrative inference. Following that section, on her interpretation, Hume employs a sense of ‘reason’ that includes both “deductive and inductive”—or rather, as Hume would say, demonstrative and probable—inference. In attributing such a shift of meaning to Book 1 Baier is following the suggestion of Barbara Winters, whose 1979 article, “Hume on Reason,”10 made a similar claim (and also acknowledged Baier for “helpful comments”). Examination of the text shows, however, that Hume says nothing to indicate that he is changing the sense of the term ‘reason’ at this (or any other) point of his writings, even though he is typically very careful to give fair warning when he uses a term in more than one sense.11 Still, it is easy enough to see why a careful reader might conclude that Hume is nevertheless changing his sense of the term ‘reason’. After all, the conclusion of his famous argument in Treatise 1.3.6 is that when the mind makes an inference from an impression to an idea—that is to say, a probable, or “inductive,” inference—it is “not determin’d by reason.” Yet whenever he refers to reason later in the Treatise—for example, in his discussions of “skepticism with regard to reason” (THN 1.4.1), the origin of the belief in bodies (THN 1.4.2), the relation between reason and motivation (THN 2.3.3), and the relation between reason and morals (THN 3.1.1)—he clearly includes probable inference or reasoning (he uses ‘inference’ and ‘reasoning’ interchangeably) as lying within the scope of reason. He consistently includes probable reasoning within the scope of reason in his other writings as well.


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Hume’s famous conclusion that probable inferences are “not determin’d by reason” has traditionally been interpreted less as a claim about the scope of particular cognitive faculties than as a normative epistemic evaluation, equivalent to the claim that inductive inferences are entirely lacking in epistemic warrant or evidential value. However, this traditional interpretation is subject to at least three very serious objections. First, as Baier herself emphasizes in her book, it cannot reconcile Hume’s conclusion with the manner in which he pursues his stated positive project in the Treatise—namely, that of establishing a “science of man” by using the “experimental method.” After the famous argument, Hume continues to pursue this project enthusiastically, without even mentioning the topic of skepticism until many pages later.12 Furthermore, we might add, this interpretation also renders Hume’s conclusion ill-suited to his argument for it, since his argument does not appear to invoke any premises about the conditions under which something has epistemic warrant or evidential value. Third, of course, it requires Hume to equivocate without warning in his use of the term ‘reason’, since he clearly uses that term elsewhere in the Treatise simply to designate an inferential faculty that includes both demonstrative and probable reasoning within its scope. In contrast to proponents of this traditional interpretation, Baier interprets Hume’s reference to “reason” in his famous conclusion as designating a restricted “Cartesian” version of reason that includes only “demonstration,” “deduction,” “intellectual intuition,” or “a priori inference.” Thus, in pronouncing inductive inferences not to be “determin’d by reason,” he is not, on her view, offering a negative epistemic evaluation of them; he is only rejecting a particular narrow theory of their origin. However, this interpretation is subject to serious objections as well. First, like the more traditional interpretation, it cannot explain why Hume fails to give notice that he is changing the sense of ‘reason’. Second, it cannot explain Hume’s well-known later references to his conclusion as establishing that we can “give no reason” for making probable inferences from our experience (e.g., THN 1.3.12.20, THN 1.4.7.3, and EHU 12.25); for this claim seems rather stronger than the claim that probable or inductive inferences are not products of a too-narrowly conceived Cartesian version of reason. Third, it cannot adequately explain the two-part structure of Hume’s argument for his famous conclusion—an argument in which he seeks to show that probable inference involves a certain task (namely, getting us to presume the uniformity of nature) that cannot be accomplished either (i) by demonstrative reasoning or (ii) by probable reasoning. For on Baier’s interpretation, the second half of this argument, concerning the inability of non-demonstrative reasoning to accomplish the stated task, is entirely superfluous.

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In fact, however, the puzzle posed by Hume’s famous conclusion is even more acute than it would be if it were merely a matter of explaining how to reconcile that conclusion with his pronouncements about the scope of reason in later sections of the Treatise. For Hume’s earlier references to “reason” in the Treatise—as well as those both before and after the almost precisely parallel argument in An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding13—also quite clearly include probable reasoning within their scope. Indeed, within the very section of the Treatise in question (and also in the corresponding section of the Enquiry), Hume regularly refers to probable inferences as reasonings. Yet how can it be that certain reasonings are not determined by reason? As I interpret Hume, his use of the term “reason” is entirely univocal; it always means “the inferential (i.e., the inference-making) faculty.14 This interpretation has the advantage of explaining why Hume gives no warning of changing senses and why his uses of the term ‘reason’ outside of his famous argument always clearly include probable as well as demonstrative reasoning. It is, however, incumbent on me to explain how Hume can say that probable (i.e., inductive) reasonings are not determined by reason, while still using the term ‘reason’ univocally to designate the inferential faculty. In order to answer this question, we must do two things. First, we must recognize that Hume consistently uses the term ‘determine’ in a causal sense—as the examination of the text shows that he does. Second, we must distinguish between an inference being an instance of reason or reasoning and the same inference being caused (i.e., determined) by reason or reasoning. Inductive inferences are of course instances or examples of reasoning; but since nothing can cause itself on Hume’s view, the fact that an inference is an instance of reasoning does not at all settle the question of whether that inference is caused by reasoning. Another way of putting this same point would be this: it is one thing to say that a belief is produced by inference or reasoning, and quite another to say that the inference or reasoning that produces that belief is itself produced or mediated by inference or reasoning. If we are to understand Hume’s paradoxicalsounding claim that inductive reasonings are not determined by reason, we must distinguish between (i) the claim that inductive inferences are each instances of reasoning and (hence) exercises of reason and (ii) the claim that inductive inferences are acts of inference that are themselves caused by some other inference or act of reasoning—for example, an act of reasoning about the relation of observed to unobserved cases. The first of these two claims Hume consistently accepts; the second he consistently denies and argues vigorously against. As I understand his conclusion, then, it means simply this:


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Inductive inferences are not themselves (entirely) caused by any further piece or pieces of reasoning—there is always a crucial step that is not caused by reasoning. It helps us to understand Hume’s famous conclusion if we can see clearly what it rules out; and a plausible interpretation of the famous conclusion should allow him to use it to rule out something that he would really endeavor to rule out. Despite Baier’s suggestion, it is unlikely that he would devote much effort to ruling out a theory according to which inductive inferences are demonstrative: in his Abstract of A Treatise of Human Nature, he remarks that “it is generally allowed by philosophers” that “there is no demonstration for any conjunction of cause and effect” (Abstract §11; emphasis added); and it is precisely on such conjunctions that Humean probable inference relies. One of the things that his famous conclusion rules out on my interpretation is a particular theory about the causal origins of inductive inferences: namely, the theory that we make an inductive inference as the causal consequence of another inference bearing on or underwriting a relation between the instances we have observed and the belief about the unobserved that results. Although Descartes did not hold such a theory, John Locke did.16 In order to explain what Hume’s conclusion opposes, it is necessary to take a brief excursion into Locke’s theory of reasoning. Demonstrative reasoning for Locke is a process in which we come to see “agreements” or connections between ideas through the use of intermediate ideas called “proofs.” (Thus, it is important to bear in mind that a Lockean “proof is an idea, not an argument.) Intuition is the immediate perception of such a connection between ideas, and we perform demonstrative inferences by using proofs to set up chains of two or more intuitions. Thus, in a single-step demonstration, we begin with an intuition of a connection between idea A and idea B, and we conclude by perceiving that there is a connection between idea A and idea C. But there is a gap between the initial intuited premise and the final conclusion. This gap concerns the connection between B and C; and so it is only by perceiving a connection between B and C that we can come to perceive the connection between A and C. This gap is filled by a second intuition, which is precisely an intuition of the connection between B and C. In this simple case, then, the inference from our previous knowledge of the connection between A and B to our new knowledge of the connection between A and C is mediated or caused by—or, as Hume would say, “determin’d by”—the intuition of the connection between B and C. Few Lockean demonstrations, however, will consist of a single step. So consider now a two-step demonstration. We begin, as before, by perceiving a connection between A and B, and this time we conclude by perceiving a

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connection between A and D. In this case, the initial gap concerns the connection between B and D; and this gap will be filled, not by a single intuition, but by a demonstrative argument that begins with an intuition of the connection between B and C and then proceeds through an intuition of the connection between C and D to reach a conclusion about the connection between B and D. The two intuitive steps just mentioned (perceiving the connection of B to C and the connection of C to D) together constitute a demonstrative argument in their own right—a demonstration of the connection between B and D. This demonstration is all that we need to add to our original intuition (of the connection between A and B) to reach a conclusion about the connection between A and D. Hence, the inference to the relation between A and D that these two steps serve to mediate is caused—i.e., determin’d—by reason, in the form a piece of reasoning (i.e., inference, ratiocination) about the connection between B and D. Locke’s view of demonstration thus entails that a demonstrative inference is always caused by another piece of demonstrative inference— except in the simplest cases, where it is caused instead by a single intuition.17 The account that Locke goes on to give of probable reasoning makes it plain that for him probable reasoning, too, always involves proofs. The difference is just this: in the case of probable reasoning, these proofs allow us to perceive, not agreement or disagreement of ideas, but rather merely probable agreement or disagreement. Now, Hume’s famous conclusion about induction entails that any theory of probable reasoning that features Lockean-style determination by a process of reasoning cannot be right. In an inductive inference, Hume argues, the transition of thought is from an impression or memory of one member of a cause-and-effect pair to a belief in its correlate. In order for reasoning to determine (i.e., mediate, or cause) an inference from one to the other, it would have to produce (via another inference) some conclusion about the gap that the first inference spans. We cannot span such a gap at all prior to having had any experience, Hume argues, for we find that we can make these inferences only after experience of constant conjunction. That is, we proceed from the observation or memory of this A, somehow assisted by the observed constant conjunction of earlier As with earlier Bs, to a conclusion that constitutes a belief in the occurrence of another B. Hence, the gap in this case between starting point and conclusion is at best a gap between a set of observed conjunctions and an unobserved one. If, therefore, reason were to cause us to make this inductive inference, it would produce assent to a conclusion about the relation or connection between the observed cases, on the one hand, and the unobserved ones, on the other. According to Hume, however, there are only two kinds of reasoning: demonstrative reasoning and probable reasoning. Hence, if reason were to bridge the gap by producing an inference about this relation, it would have to perform this


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feat either by demonstrative reasoning or probable reasoning. Hume then famously argues that neither kind of argument can meet this demand. Hence, he concludes, reason does not determine us to make inductive inferences through any kind of reasoning; his almost equally famous answer “Custom or Habit” is (as David Owen has rightly emphasized18) the positive answer to the very same causal question to which “not reason” is the negative answer. ‘Reason’, here as elsewhere in Hume, designates the inferential faculty that includes both demonstrative and probable reasoning. Of course, if Hume retains a univocal sense of ‘reason’ throughout Book 1 of the Treatise, it is less likely that he undertakes to enlarge his sense of the term in Book 2 in such a way as to make it encompass curiosity or the love of truth; and indeed he does not. It is the central thesis of Treatise 2.3.3 (“Of the influencing motives of the will”) that “reason alone” cannot motivate us to any action. Yet it is clear, both from the final section of Treatise Book 1 and from the final section of Treatise Book 2 (“Of curiosity, or the love of truth”) that “curiosity, or love of truth” is a passion that does alone motivate us to action, just as do the passions for hunting and gaming. Hence, if reason comes to include this passion, Hume must give up his earlier thesis that reason alone cannot motivate. In fact, however, the thesis that reason alone cannot motivate is not only repeated but is assigned a crucial argumentative role at the very outset of Treatise Book 3, in Hume’s argument for the conclusion that “moral distinctions are not derived from reason.” There is, I believe, no passage in the Treatise that states or even suggests that the passion of curiosity is itself a part of reason; rather, as Lloyd’s treatment implies, Hume always regards it as a distinct passion of the mind that motivates the use of reason. At this point, I think, we should be rather surprised if, in Book 3, Hume’s previously univocal use of the term ‘reason’ were to expand “to include also our capacity to coordinate our speaking and our actions with the speech and action of our fellows, to coordinate moral and aesthetic judgments as well as factual and mathematical ones.” And in fact, no such expansion occurs. Hume is very careful, both in Book 3 of the Treatise and in Appendix 1 of An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, to mark out the distinct and complementary roles of reason and sentiment in moral judgment. Reason—specifically, probable reasoning—plays a crucial role in discovering what the consequences of various character traits are. It plays an equally crucial role in enabling us to reach intersubjective agreement in morals; for in order to discount aspects of our idiosyncratic perspectives so as to “correct” the moral sentiments that we feel from them, we must first use our probable reason to show us what we would be caused to feel if we were differently situated or constituted. Nevertheless, Hume recognizes many capacities and sentiments that enter into our ability to coordinate speaking and acting with others and to coordinate our sentiment-based

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judgments. These include the ability to form abstract ideas and to use the general terms of a language, the ability to sympathize with others, the ability to have moral and aesthetic sentiments, the tendency to classify in accordance with those sentiments, and the desire or inclination to conform our language to that of others. Reason, as the inferential faculty, cooperates with these other abilities and desires, but it does not come to subsume them. If it did, then “reason,” understood as including moral sentiments, would after all be sufficient to make moral distinctions, contrary to Hume’s neverreversed dictum that it is not. In contrast to Baier’s highly inclusive version of Humean reason stands Lloyd’s seemingly very exclusive version; for, as we have noted, she asserts that Humean reason “has nothing to do” with our beliefs about matters fact and that, for Hume, our inference-based beliefs about matters of fact are to be ascribed not to reason but to the imagination. In making these interpretive claims, of course, she seems only to be following the lead of Hume himself, whose famous conclusion about induction reads in full: When the mind, therefore, passes from the idea or impression of one object to the idea or belief of another, it is not determin’d by reason, but by certain principles, which associate together the ideas of these objects, and unite them in the imagination“ (THN 1.3.6.12; emphasis added).

Yet Lloyd’s interpretive claims are highly paradoxical, nonetheless. For as we have noted, Hume consistently uses the term ‘reason’ to include probable reasoning; and he argues at length in Treatise 1.3.1 and again in Section 4 of An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding that probable reasoning is responsible for a vast number of the beliefs we have concerning matters of fact. Indeed, he implies that probable reasoning is responsible for all beliefs about matters of fact except those that are the objects of present perception or memory or (in the Treatise) are the products of the sheer verbal repetition that he rather sardonically calls “education.” Fortunately, however, we can now easily resolve this paradox, by employing the distinction we have already drawn between an inference being an instance of reason or reasoning and the same inference being determined (i.e., caused) by reason or reasoning. As I have argued, Hume’s view is that, in every piece of probable reasoning, there is a crucial step taken by the mind that is not caused by any reasoning or inference; the step is instead a result of custom or habit. It does not follow from this, however, that these probable inferences themselves are not instances of reason, as indeed they are. Thus, reason can have much to do with the beliefs we form about matters of fact by probable inference even though those inferences themselves are not “determin’d by reason.”


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But if most of our beliefs about matters of fact do result from reason, operating in the form of probable reasoning, then what of Hume’s assignment of the determination of our probable inferences to the imagination? The term ‘imagination’, unlike the term ‘reason’, is one that Hume does use in two different senses—as he tells us explicitly: When I oppose the imagination to the memory, I mean the faculty, by which we form our fainter ideas. When I oppose it to reason, I mean the same faculty, excluding only our demonstrative and probable reasonings. When I oppose it to neither, ’tis indifferent whether it be taken in the larger or more limited sense, or at least the context will sufficiently explain the meaning. (THN 1.3.9.19n)

Whereas reason is the inferential faculty for Hume, the imagination is a representational faculty—specifically, a faculty for having imagistic ideas. Furthermore, whereas Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz (among others) distinguish the intellect and the imagination as two different representational faculties, Hume does without the intellect (a faculty for having non-imagistic ideas) and offers only memory as a further representational faculty. Since the assent or belief that results from inference is, for Hume, only a particular, lively way of conceiving our ideas, reason is, in effect, one aspect of the operation of the imagination (THN 1.3.7.5n)—in the broad sense of ‘imagination’ that Hume opposes to memory. However, Hume also thinks that when we attend to the many operations of our chief representational faculty, we can distinguish those that constitute our reason from the many that stand in addition to our reason; and hence we can also use the term ‘imagination’ in a narrower sense, to designate all of the aspects of our representational faculty except those that constitute our faculty for demonstrative and probable reasoning. When Hume attributes the crucial step that occurs in probable inferences to an associative feature of the imagination, he has already denied that this step is itself caused by a piece of reasoning or inference, and he is ascribing it instead to another operation (associative custom or habit) of our chief representational faculty, the imagination. He is not, however, denying that this manifestation of an associative feature of the imagination (in the broad sense) is part of the operation of reason—for indeed, it is a crucial part of the operation of probable reason and helps to constitute it. Thus far, Hume’s famous conclusion about induction or probable reasoning appears to be part of a consistent treatment of reason’s nature, scope, and relation to the imagination. However, Anne Jacobson argues that Hume “at times even explicitly rejects the goal of arriving at consistent answers” and “asserts as true and unproblematic statements that he also says are false or irrational.” She offers two cases in point: Hume’s treatment of skepticism concerning induction and his treatment of the belief in a

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world of external bodies, which he also calls “continued and distinct existences.” I will discuss these cases in order.19 Jacobson’s discussion of induction takes as its starting point a remark of Hume’s from the concluding section of An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding: The sceptic had better keep within his proper sphere, and display those philosophical objections, which arise from more profound researches. Here [the sceptic] seems to have ample matter of triumph; while he justly insists, that all our evidence for any matter of fact, which lies beyond the testimony of sense or memory, is derived entirely from the relation of cause and effect; that we have no other idea of this relation than that of two objects which have been frequently conjoined together; that we have no argument to convince us, that objects, which have, in our experience, been frequently conjoined, will likewise, in other instances, be conjoined in the same manner; and that nothing leads us to this inference but custom or a certain instinct of our nature; which it is indeed difficult to resist, but which, like other instincts, may be fallacious and deceitful. While the sceptic insists upon these topics, he shows his force, or rather, indeed, his own and our weakness; and seems, for the time at least, to destroy all assurance and conviction. (EHU 12.22)

Since Hume continues to believe—often with considerable confidence— in matters of fact beyond his senses and memory, it is easy to see why Jacobson sees evidence of inconsistency in this passage. She focuses particularly on two aspects of it: the claim that the skeptic’s insistence is “just,” and the claim that the skeptic seems, at least for a time, to “destroy all assurance and conviction.” She concludes that “Hume’s attack on skepticism does not aim to place its truth in question” and that Hume continues to believe in matters of fact even though “the skeptic certainly appears to have won the truth game.” Nevertheless, if we look closely at what the skeptic is “justly” insisting, it proves to be a list of doctrines to which Hume is unequivocally and proudly committed: the doctrine that beliefs about matters of fact beyond present perception or memory depend on the relation of cause and effect; his analysis of our idea of causation as a relation of objects that have been constantly conjoined; and the doctrine that inductive inferences are not themselves caused by reasoning and are instead caused the instinctive mechanism of habit. To these he adds a mild (and inductive!) argument that our probable reason “may be fallacious and deceitful” (emphasis added). There is no doubt that Hume regards all of these results as “skeptical,” in the sense that they manifest “the whimsical condition of mankind”; the recognition of this whimsical condition is the announced cause of Hume’s own self-described “mitigated skepticism.” But accepting these “skeptical” results leads Hume into no inconsistency; for there is no contradiction in believing all of them while still believing—as clearly Hume does—that the results of one’s probable reasonings are in fact, on the whole, true. Earlier in the section, skeptics of the kind that he opposes have been characterized as urging much more—namely, the “absolute fallaciousness of [our] mental


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faculties, or their unfitness to reach any fixed determination” (EHU 12.5; emphasis added). This stronger conclusion is not something that Hume says is “justly insisted.” Indeed, the ultimate fitness of our mental faculties for reaching determinations is—as Baier rightly insists in connection with the Treatise—a normative question to be determined reflexively, as part of a review of the whole mind by the whole mind. In both the Treatise and the Enquiry our cognitive faculties, properly corrected, modified, and chastened, ultimately pass that test. Although Hume continues to accept as true many beliefs that he thinks are not produced by reasoning—and are not, in that limited sense, “rational”—this is far from accepting beliefs that he regards as being false or as irrational in the sense of being contrary to the results of our actual reasoning.20 Furthermore, although Hume often describes and even (in the Treatise) reports in the first person the very temporary amazement and extinction of belief that can result from intense examination of the mechanisms underlying some of our most fundamental kinds of beliefs, he does not ultimately conclude from these examinations and experiences that our most fundamental beliefs are false or should not be believed. Intense exposure to skeptical “objections” concerning our faculties, derived from examination of the operations of those faculties (examinations which, often at least, use those very faculties), can produce a limited and temporary inconstancy in belief, but it does not lead Hume to abandon the goal of consistency in belief. As Jacobson urges, however, Hume’s treatment of belief in the external world may still seem to be a case in which he does abandon the goal of consistency. Thus, she writes: On the one hand, there are many passages in Hume in which he appears to speak unhesitantly about what we know to be an exterior and independent world. However, he also offers us an interpretation of what these statements mean, and on this interpretation, many, and perhaps all, of his statements are false or the irrational products of a monstrous system. (75)

In claiming that Hume must regard all statements about the external world as either “false” or “the irrational products of a monstrous system” Jacobson refers, of course, to the two different ways in which, according to Hume’s theory, human beings can believe in external bodies. Through the operation of natural features of the imagination, the vulgar come to attribute “continued and distinct existence” to their very perceptions—they thus do not distinguish between perceptions and bodies. The philosophical, however, quickly realize through “a very little reflection and philosophy” (THN 1.4.2.44) that their perceptions themselves are not continued and distinct, but are instead interrupted and dependent. Accordingly, they seek to maintain their belief in continued and distinct existences, a belief that

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originated in the form of the “vulgar” view, by postulating a set of objects distinct from and causing their perceptions. Hume does indeed characterize an aspect of the vulgar form of belief in bodies—namely, the supposition that it is the very things they immediately perceive that are continued and distinct—as false. It is also true that he characterizes the philosophical version of the belief in external bodies as the “monstrous offspring” of two principles. These two principles are the imagination (in the narrow sense), which produces the original belief in continued and distinct existences, and reflection, which shows that our perceptions cannot be such existences. However, Hume uses the term ‘monstrous’ not in the sense of “horrible” or “outrageously wrong,” but rather in the eighteenth century sense (as documented by the Oxford English Dictionary) of “deviating from the natural order” because (metaphorically) “something compounded of elements of two or more animal forms.” Furthermore, it is precisely the mind’s discomfort at the “inconsistency” between the belief in continued and distinct existences and the intermittent recognition of the interruptedness of our perceptions that (“happily,” Hume says) leads to the philosophical view. To be sure, Hume (i) explains in detail that the belief in continued and distinct existences is not the product of reason alone, (ii) asserts that our perceptions are not (contrary to the vulgar conflation) such existences, (iii) emphasizes that the philosophical view cannot be supported by causal reasoning, and (iv) expresses (at the conclusion of Treatise 1.4.2) a strong momentary doubt about continued and distinct existences in the face of his causal explanation of the origins of the belief in their existence. However, the belief in continued and distinct existences itself is not one that he ever pronounces to be false or, upon full and final consideration, to be unworthy of our belief.

3. FEMINISM AND THE VALUE OF HUMEAN REASON As I promised, I have tried to evaluate three recent claims about Hume’s treatment of reason—namely the claim that he uses the term ‘reason’ in shifting senses, the claim that he assigns the results of probable inference to the imagination rather than to reason, and the claim that he gives up the aim of consistency. I have also attempted to adjudicate—taking Lloyd’s part against Baier’s claim that Humean reason subsumes curiosity, and taking Baier’s part against Jacobson’s claim that Hume gives up the aim of consistency. However, I wish also to pursue the third of the four activities Jacobson invites: reconciling. For perhaps I have not interpreted our three authors as they intended to be understand. Baier may be willing to agree that Hume’s own use of the word reason does not literally change senses; perhaps her remarks about “shifting senses” of ‘reason’ and “enlarging


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reason” should be taken instead to describe what Hume does with a broader cultural conception of “the reasonable” rather than with his own sense of the term ‘reason’. If so, I would happily concur. Lloyd may be willing to agree that Hume’s considered view makes probable inference a species of reason as well as a product of the imagination; perhaps in stating that reason for Hume has “no role” in beliefs generated by probable inference, she meant to offer no interpretation to the contrary but only a loose paraphrase of Hume’s own version of his famous conclusion about induction. If so, I would happily concur. Jacobson may be willing to agree that Hume’s “constructive” philosophy involves a final commitment to the results of induction and the existence of external (“continued and distinct”) bodies; perhaps she meant only to emphasize the non-rational origins of many Humean beliefs, the temporary loss of confidence that he believes can follow from the examination of their origins, and his belief that even philosophers such as himself tend naturally to slip back from the philosophical into the false “vulgar” view of bodies at times when there is no pressure on them to maintain the distinction between perceptions and bodies. If so, I would again happily concur. Finally, I would like to generalize—the fourth of the invited activities— by addressing the question of how the understanding of Hume’s treatment of reason that I have offered bears on the question of the potential interest and value of that treatment for feminism. I hope and believe that the revisions to our understanding of Hume’s treatment of reason that I have proposed, when added to the rich understanding already provided by Baier, Lloyd, and Jacobson, may render that treatment more, rather than less, conducive to feminist aims and concerns, in several ways. First, Hume employs his univocal sense of the term ‘reason’—according to which it means simply “the inferential faculty”—in the service of his attempt to understand scientifically and experimentally the processes and operations of that faculty and its relations to other aspects of the mind, including passion and imagination. (That is, it is in the service of what Jacobson calls his “cognitive science.”) As such, his univocal treatment of reason constitutes the fullest development of the project that Baier and Lloyd both call “naturalizing reason.” All too often in Western philosophy, the term ‘reason’ has been allowed a remarkably vague scope while at the same time being assigned an automatic honorific status. Such a situation is tailor-made for smuggling in a variety of dubious values—including sexist values—under the normative cover of “rationality,” and for issuing a variety of dubious pronouncements—including sexist pronouncements—as unassailable “dictates of reason.” Of course, Baier’s reflexive conception of normativity helps her to avoid the uncritical normative acceptance of aspects of the mind as “rational.” Nevertheless, the project she describes as Hume’s, that of incorporating various aspects of the mind into an ever-

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expanding conception of reason as we come to recognize and approve those aspects, retains ‘reason’ as an honorific term, and thus it potentially hinders us from making a fair, searching, and normatively unbiased examination of the inferential faculty itself. It is precisely such an examination that Hume undertakes to make throughout Book 1 of the Treatise and in An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding. In retaining the term ‘reason’ for just the inferential faculty, Hume naturalizes and demythologizes that faculty in a way that makes it easier to subject it (especially in the final section of the Treatise but also in the final section of the first Enquiry) to “review” by “the whole mind.” In addition, Hume’s naturalistic and highly specific conception of reason—as the ability to assess relations of ideas plus the associative projection of observed regularities—creates a very strong burden of proof on anyone who wishes to suggest that men and women (or any two groups of human beings) differ in purely rational abilities, or to suggest that reason itself has any sex-specific (or race-specific, or classspecific) characteristics.21 Second, Hume’s conception of inferentially based beliefs about “matters of fact” as lying unambiguously within the scope of reason renders them, as they surely should be, proper subjects of argument and debate—including feminist argument and debate. Furthermore, whereas an ascription of such beliefs to “the imagination rather than to reason” cannot help but serve to reinforce the very opposition between reason and imagination that Lloyd rightly sees Hume as opposing, Hume’s own conception of reason as one aspect of the imagination (in the broad sense of ‘imagination’) cannot help but serve to break down such oppositions in valuable ways.22 Yet his conception of inference-based belief also allows him to distinguish a second, narrower sense of ‘imagination,’ in which imagination is distinct from but still closely interrelated with reason, and in which its various external influences on reason can be carefully and individually examined and assessed. Third, Hume’s commitment to consistency makes his philosophy far more useful than it would otherwise be. As Jacobson rightly argues, it would be foolish of us to wield a demand for consistency in such a way as to ignore or silence voices that fail to meet that demand; and of course Hume need adopt no such policy. But—to make what is perhaps an obvious point—unless we strive for consistency ourselves, our commitment to true and socially beneficial beliefs need not be any hindrance to our also maintaining the opposites of those beliefs. Less obviously, but perhaps even more significantly, a striving toward internal consistency is one of the leading motivations operative in the kind of “review of the whole mind by the whole mind” that will allow the mind to “bear its own survey”—that is, the kind of review that Baier rightly sees as central to Hume’s project of philosophical improvement. It is for precisely this reason that she


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emphasizes, at the outset of the final chapter of her book, that consistency is reason’s “minimal demand” for Hume. It is most often when we find inconsistencies in our own beliefs, reactions, or rules that we are motivated to restructure, “correct,” and refine the operations and interrelations of our own faculties. Just as a univocal and naturalized sense of ‘reason’ allows us to focus on our own rational faculties as a topic for critical appraisal without prejudging normative issues about them, the goal of consistency provides the main engine that drives that critical appraisal.23 Baier is surely right to think that such a project of improving our faculties, rational and moral, by subjecting them to their own scrutiny, is at the heart of both Humean philosophy and human progress. For Hume, the human “moral sense” consists of a relatively simple set of sentimental reactions. Yet through their complex interactions with our experiences, with our other faculties, and with other people, they are capable of correcting themselves through rules, reflecting on themselves, refining themselves, and, ultimately, approving of themselves. The Humean moral sense sets itself on its own journey of development—not only in the history of each individual, but also in the history of humankind. Its progressively refining and improving itself depends on its incorporating ever-greater ranges of sympathetic experience and thereby coming to reconcile increasingly diverse points of view. When this process of enlargement occurs, Humeans hold, our conception of what is or is not a moral virtue can change for the better. For Hume, something very similar is true of human “reason” itself. It consists of a relatively simple set of ideational operations. Yet through their complex interactions with our experiences, with our other faculties, and with other people, they are capable of correcting themselves through rules, reflecting on themselves, refining themselves, and, ultimately, approving of themselves. Reason, too, sets itself on its own journey of development—not only in the history of each individual, but also in the history of humankind. Its progressively refining and improving itself depends on its incorporating ever-greater ranges of experience and thereby coming to reconcile increasingly diverse points of view. When this process of enlargement occurs, Humeans hold, our conception of what is or is not a cognitive virtue can change for the better. Thus, Hume has conceptions of both morality and reason that are essentially temporal and progressive, conceptions that stand in direct opposition to the idea that morality and reason provide, in principle, a single privileged and timeless point of view on questions of right action and right belief. It is this, I venture to suggest, that constitutes one of the most valuable aspects of Hume’s philosophy for feminists, as it does also for all the members of what, following Hume and Baier, we may call “the party of [hu]mankind.” Although broad in some respects, Hume’s own range of

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experiences and acquaintances was necessarily limited in various ways—as, of course, are ours in other ways. Given these limitations, it is not surprising that Hume’s own remarks about men and women are, from the perspective of our point in history, a mixed performance. But it is worth remembering that Hume’s own theory entails that those with more inclusive perspectives than his—and especially those who can hear and understand more voices— will be able to render better and more adequate judgments than Hume himself about both morals and reason. I am confident that he recognized and embraced this entailment. At least part of the enduring value of Hume’s philosophy lies, I believe, in its principled capacity to continue to explain, encourage, and endorse improvements in the standards of morals and reason that go beyond those dreamt of by its author.24

NOTES 1

Eva Kittay and Diana Meyers, editors, Women and Moral Theory (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1987). 2 Baier continues: “Women in his society were inferior in bodily strength and in intellectual achievement. Neither of these, however, for someone who believes that reason should be the slave of reflective and moralized passions, is the capacity that matters most. What matters most, for judging moral wisdom, are corrected sentiments, imaginations, and cooperative genius. There Hume never judges women inferior. He does call them the “timorous and pious” sex, and that is for him a criticism, but since he ties both of these characteristics with powerlessness, his diagnoses here are of a piece with his more direct discussions of how much power women have. In those discussions he is at pains not just to try to point out the subordination of their interests to those of men in the existing institutions (marriage in particular) but also to show women where their power lies, should they want to change the situation.” (73) 3 Annette Baier, A Progress of Sentiments: Reflections on Hume’s Treatise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). 4 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, edited by David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton, Oxford Philosophical Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978). References are given as ‘THN’ followed by Book, Part, Section, and Paragraph numbers, in that order. 5 Louise M. Antony and Charlotte Witt, editors, A Mind of One’s Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993). 6 Anne Jaap Jacobson, editor, Feminist Interpretations of Hume, (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000). 7 Cognition and Commitment in Hume’s Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), Chapter 10. 8 See A Progress of Sentiments, pages 60 and 278, for this latter description of the “Cartesian” reason with which Hume is said to begin. 9 Similarly, she wrote in The Man of Reason (52) that for Hume “knowledge of ‘matters of fact’ is the province not of Reason, but of imagination.” 10 Barbara Winters, “Hume on Reason,” Hume Studies 5.1 (April 1979): 20-35. 11 Terms for which he carefully gives warning of dual senses include ‘probability’, ‘imagination’, and ‘natural’.

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Hume mentions skepticism briefly, but without reference to his earlier argument concerning probable or “inductive” arguments, at Treatise 1.3.13.12. Hume does not refer to the famous argument of Treatise 1.3.6 in connection with skepticism until the final section of Book I (THN 1.4.7). In An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, the corresponding argument concerning induction occurs in Section 4. A brief comment on skepticism follows at the beginning of Section 5, but no further mention of skepticism occurs until the final section of the book. 13 David Hume, An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, edited by Tom L. Beauchamp, The Clarendon Edition of the Works of David Hume, Volume 3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). References to An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding are given as ‘EHU’ plus the Section and Paragraph numbers. 14 .“In Book 2, Hume does distinguish some “improper” senses of ‘reason’—one according to which actions are said to be contrary to or in accordance with reason, and another in which calm passions are mislabeled as “reason.” But Hume clearly characterizes these senses as improper and does not employ them himself. 15 I add “entirely” because Hume allows that some probable arguments are complicated affairs involving many probable inferences as parts. My statement of Hume’s conclusion precisely matches his final statement of it at Enquiry 5.2: “In all reasonings from experience, there is a step taken by the mind, which is not supported by any argument or process of the understanding.” 16 The account presented in the next three paragraphs is also presented at somewhat greater length in “Ideas, Reason, and Skepticism,” Hume Studies xxiv.1 (April 1998), pp. 171-194 (see especially pp. 182-184). I am grateful to Peter Millican, to whom that article is in part a response, for the stimulus of his acute questioning of my earlier interpretation of Hume’s conclusion. David Owen gives an excellent account of Locke’s theory of reasoning in his book Hume’s Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). I also owe a great deal to stimulating discussions with Owen. I agree with him that Locke is at least one chief target of Hume’s famous conclusion; however, Owen’s interpretation of the meaning of that conclusion is one that still requires Hume to equivocate on the meaning of ‘reason’. 17 Note the Hume’s version of his famous conclusion in An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding denies that inductive inferences result from “reasoning or any process of the understanding”—that latter disjunct presumably ruling out Lockean intuition. 18 David Owen, Hume’s Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 19 Jacobson also discusses at some length what she considers to be a “semantic inconstancy” involving Hume’s application of tenses in connection with his two definitions of ‘cause’. It is not clear to me whether she intends to call this an intentional adoption of an inconsistency on Hume’s part. For this reason, I will not discuss her interpretation on this point. 20 In the concluding section of Book 1 of the Treatise, Hume faces what he calls a “dangerous dilemma,” resulting from the realization that repeated applications of standard reasoning in accordance with “the probability of causes” would bring about the annihilation of all assent and belief. But although this annihilation of belief would be the outcome of reason, if it operated alone, the reasoning in question is not reasoning that human beings can actually carry out to sustainable skeptical effect; and Hume’s “Title Principle” is intended to provide a principle upon which the “title to operate on us” of such reasoning can be consistently rejected. 21 As Baier herself has noted, Hume provides (in a footnote to section 9 of An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding) a highly specific list of the ways in which one human being could exceed another in reasoning. Nearly all of these depend either on external circumstances or on other related capacities of the mind. 22 For example, Hume’s conception of nearly all cognitive functioning as consisting in operations of the imagination helps to explain why Hume is the first modern philosopher to

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regard the investigation of literary aesthetics as an essential part of the understanding of our rational faculties. 23 I owe this way of putting the point to Geoffrey Sayre-McCord. 24 I wish to express my appreciation to Livia Guimaraes, Geoffrey Sayre-McCord, David Owen, Peter Millican, and Jennifer Herdt for very helpful discussions of topics related directly to this paper.

REFERENCES Baier, Annette.“Hume, the Women’s Moral Theorist?” In Eva Kittay and Diana Meyers (eds.) Women and Moral Theory. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1987. Baier, Annette. A Progress of Sentiments: Reflections on Hume’s Treatise. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991. Baier, Annette. “Hume, the Reflective Women’s Epistemologist?” In Louise M. Antony and Charlotte Witt (eds.) A Mind of One’s Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993. Reprinted in Anne Jaap Jacobson (ed.) Feminist Interpretations of Hume. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000. Garrett, Don. Cognition and Commitment in Hume’s Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Garrett Don. “Ideas, Reason, and Skepticism,” Hume Studies xxiv.1 (April 1998), pp. 171194. Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature, edited by David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton, Oxford Philosophical Texts. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Lloyd, Genevieve. The Man of Reason: “Male” and “Female” in Western Philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984; second edition, 1993. Lloyd, Genevieve. “Hume on the Passion for Truth,” In Anne Jaap Jacobson (ed.) Feminist Interpretations of Hum. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000. Jacobson, Anne Jaap. “Reconceptualizing Reasoning and Writing the Philosophical Canon: The Case of David Hume.” In Anne Jaap Jacobson (ed.) Feminist Interpretations of Hume. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000. Owen, David, Hume’s Reason. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Winters, Barbara. “Hume on Reason,” Hume Studies 5.1 (April 1979): 20-35.

DESCARTES AND ELISABETH A PHILOSOPHICAL DIALOGUE?

Lilli Alanen (Uppsala University, Sweden)

1. INTRODUCTION Although Elisabeth of Bohemia is one of the most famous women in Seventeenth Century philosophy, there are no writings recorded or published in her name, with the exception of some of her letters. She owes her fame mainly to one of her correspondents, René Descartes, who dedicated his magnum opus, The Principles of Philosophy to her, and who was so impressed with her philosophical talents, that he undertook, in his dedicatory letter, “as a service to mankind” to set them down, “as an example to posterity”. (AT VIII-A 1, CSM I 190) He praises her for the two reasons for which a person can be called truly virtuous. For true virtue, as Descartes understands it, is one and the same as wisdom and consists, first, in a firm resolve to use one’s reasoning power’s correctly, and second, in an equally firm resolve to carry out whatever one knows to be best. Wisdom, thus described, has two prerequisites, “the perception of the intellect and the disposition of the will.” Elisabeth meets in an exemplary manner both requirements in having “a very firm resolve to act rightly” and by combining the “sharpest intelligence” with “the utmost zeal for acquiring knowledge of the truth.” (AT VIII-A 3, CSM I 191) He continues: That such zeal is abundantly present in Your Highness is clear from the fact that neither the diversions of the Court nor the customary education that so often condemns young ladies to ignorance has been able to prevent you from studying all the worthwhile arts and sciences. (AT VIII-A 3, CSM I 191-192)


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He also praises the “incomparable sharpness of her intelligence” of which he personally has found evidence in the fact that she is the only one of his readers who has understood all his previously published works. Descartes gives a reason for this claim in explaining that it is generally true that many of the sharpest minds who have no difficulty understanding metaphysics, dislike or even hate geometry, whereas those who are able to grasp what he has written in geometry have little or no understanding of metaphysics. Elisabeth, Descartes testifies, is truly exceptional in this respect. “Your intellect is, to my knowledge, unique in finding everything equally clear; and this is why my use of the term ‘incomparable’ is quite deserved.” (AT VIII-A 4, CSM I 192) Who was Elisabeth? A young Princess of Bohemia exiled by the 30-year religious war, daughter of Elisabeth Stuart, whose father was James, I of England, and of Frederick, Elector Palatine who was King of Bohemia for one dramatic winter in Prague (1619-20). She was born in 1618 and lived with her family—almost destitute—as a refugee in Holland. But who was she, beyond being a beautiful young Princess in exile conforming to Descartes’s idea of virtue, a zealous student of mathematics and philosophy, as well as a perceptive reader of Descartes’s published work? Can – should she --be taken seriously also as a philosopher with a voice and viewpoints of her own? One of the problems in trying to answer questions like these is that there are no texts or systematic presentations of her views on the basis of which we could attribute anything like a distinctive philosophical position to her. This does not necessarily mean she did not have any, but what evidence is there that she did? We have her correspondence with Descartes, which contains what looks like an exchange of serious, philosophical points of view. But perhaps this too could be questioned. For doesn’t Descartes throughout their correspondence play the role of Elisabeth’s intellectual mentor and medical advisor, whereas Elisabeth volunteers for the role of submissive student, or patient needing to be cured from illness and mistakes? If she first turned to Descartes with a philosophical question, she later addressed him mainly for comfort and guidance in moral and psychological matters. We also find her constantly reminding him of the weaknesses and curses of her sex, and she was, moreover, very young. She neither wrote nor published nor is she known to have participated in any philosophical discussions in public forums.1 Is it not clear that Elisabeth could not have taken part in such exchanges as a philosopher on an equal footing with her mentor? How could she then be called a philosopher at all, let alone a philosopher with views of her own? This latter question has been raised many times, and it was discussed not long ago at a conference on women philosophers in the Century,

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where two different answers were given. The first, by Daniel Garber, suggested that it should be answered in the negative, while the other, by Lisa Shapiro, argued that Elisabeth can be seen as attempting to articulate her own distinctive view, and that even if her way of practicing philosophy consists mainly in raising objections to Descartes’s views, the objections she raises go straight to the fundamental assumptions on which Descartes’s teaching rests, and are incisive and challenging enough to merit her recognition as a serious philosophical thinker on her own.2 Both Garber and Shapiro give good arguments for their respective case and both provide answers to the above question, which are interesting in their own right. I will start by summarizing their views, for they will help me frame the topic of this paper and introduce my own questions, which have to do with what it is to do philosophy, what forms a philosophical dialogue can take, and whether the conversations between Elisabeth and her philosophical teacher and admirer should be counted as a genuine dialogue. My aim is to show that whatever socio-political, scholarly, and other gendered categories may have separated Elisabeth from Descartes, and in spite of the fact that she did not defend any systematic philosophical views of her own, Elisabeth transcended those conditions in developing what I would call a genuine philosophical dialogue with Descartes— perhaps one of the finest we have—one to which each had as much to give as to learn, and which sustained a lifelong friendship.

2. A LEARNED MAID OR A PHILOSOPHER IN HER OWN RIGHT? While Garber recognizes that “there is a considerable amount of philosophy in Elisabeth’s correspondence with Descartes,” and although he also seems to recognize that her thinking is philosophical even when her style of philosophizing is rather different from Descartes’s, he maintains that this in itself is not enough to make her a philosopher. She simply does not fit the mold of philosopher and should be thought of rather as a ‘Learned Maid’, a term that Garber borrows from Anna Maria van Schurman, a contemporary of Elisabeth.3 Anna Maria van Schurman is known to posterity as a devout and pious Christian who is impressively learned, not least in ancient and living languages.4 But she did not produce any sustained scholarly work herself, like the male renaissance-type “polymaths“ and humanists, like Erasmus, or her friend Justus Lipsius, to whom Garber compares her. Unlike Elisabeth, she did write and publish, and she is known above all through a treatise published in English translation with the title The Learned Maid or, Whether a Maid may be a Scholar: A Logic Exercise in

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1659. Its aim is to prove, using Aristotelian syllogisms, that the study of letters is not unsuitable for a Christian woman. Learning, for the scholarly maid, unlike for the male humanists, is something pursued “for its own sake, for personal cultivation, and not for publication, as in the University or the learned academy.” The example of van Schurman and the model she proposed for women is where we should look, Garber argues, to find the proper frame of discourse within which the exchange between Elisabeth and Descartes is to be located. It is the gendered distinction between the male philosopher and the learned maid that shapes Descartes’s conception of Elisabeth as well as Elisabeth’s conception of her self.6 It sets the stage for their encounter that any serious historiographer should take into account in assessing the role and place of Elisabeth in the history of philosophy. Shapiro for her part, while recognizing the difficulty “to talk about Elisabeth without subordinating her to her correspondent,” does find evidence that Elisabeth not only asked Descartes some very hard questions but that she held and attempted to articulate a point of view of her own. By a careful scrutiny of Elisabeth’s questions and remarks, Shapiro detects a struggle to find a way of preserving “the intuition behind Descartes’s substance dualism—that is, the intuition that thought is not a mere matter of bodily motions—while at the same time acknowledging that this faculty of reason is still in some way dependent on the body.” She finds evidence that Elisabeth was “gesturing towards a third sort of alternative for understanding the relation between the mind and body” in suggesting (in one of her letters to Descartes) that although extension is not necessary for thought, it might suit some other, not less essential, function of the soul.”7 She also notes that Elisabeth articulated her point more fully in their later correspondence, where the focus is on how the passions affect us and on the possibility of the mind regulating them. This part of the exchange, as Shapiro points out, is usually neglected, but unjustly so, because Elisabeth is pursuing the same question there.8 But instead of addressing it as a question of conceptual or metaphysical consistency, it is there addressed as a practical ethical concern. In order to answer the question of what sort of cultural and intellectual framework this exchange should be seen as belonging to, it is worthwhile to ask how the philosopher and teacher, Descartes, might have looked at it, and what his stake in it could have been. I take it there was more to it than simply being flattered by the interest shown by a smart, young member of a royal family, which, in spite of being powerless and destitute, was nonetheless at least potentially influential. Descartes, after all, was also in a kind of (deliberately chosen) exile at the time of their meeting. He tried to escape academic quarrels and controversies, constantly moving from one town to another in search of a place where he could pursue his work in


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undisturbed peace and quiet. He was, it goes without saying, also looking for a new audience, for he did not expect to find much understanding among the learned of the universities, nor did he give much for their opinion, which he held to be basically perverted beyond rescue by the teachings of the School.9 He hoped to see their manuals replaced by one he was working on for that purpose at the time Elisabeth contacted him. Meanwhile, his only hope was to interest the audience of scientists and well-educated lay persons outside the schools and universities in his work and in the ideas he wanted to propagate- not least a whole new system of explanation of nature. He was among the first of his time to publish scientific essays (those accompanying the Discourse of the Method, in the vernacular, and he did it to address the laymen (and women) of unspoiled good sense, whose support he needed for his enterprise.10 His correspondence with those he could count as friends within the school, as well as with numerous scientists and learned outside it, was of greatest importance not only for propagating, but also for discussing and developing, his new ideas. Of his collected writings (in the standard edition of Adam et Tannery) 5 out of 12 volumes are filled with his letters. Of all his correspondents, Elisabeth occupies a special place, not least because she is the only woman with whom he had a sustained correspondence, but because of her interest in his philosophy and the intelligence of her questions, which rendered her the ideal correspondent. Descartes finds in her a perfect representative of that natural reason he praises so much, a person of unspoiled good sense, to whose judgment he defers in a way he never would to a schoolman, or even to a fellow scientist whom he never really seems to trust completely and certainly not over such a long period of time. Descartes has every reason to take her questions seriously, and he does. What she thinks of his philosophy matters more to him than what most of his other readers think.11 This shows itself in the fact that Descartes, instead of getting annoyed or irritated, as he often does with others, takes delight in the questions she poses, even in those he has a hard time answering, and he uses them as occasions to rethink, rephrase and develop his views, rather than merely repeat them as he can be seen doing to others.12 Elisabeth and Descartes came into contact through a common friend in Amsterdam, Henri Pollot. Elisabeth had studied Descartes’s philosophy partly with the help of Regius (or Henry Le Roy), the first university teacher to actually teach Descartes’s ideas in Utrecht. Elisabeth had asked Regius to explain Descartes’s view of the mind body-union and Regius advised her to ask Descartes himself directly. Pollot, their common friend, got Descartes approval of her request to consult him. It is interesting to note that Descartes’s friendship with Regius, his only pupil at the time, had

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suffered a severe blow because of Regius’ failure to understand and correctly present the position of his teacher on this very same topic.

3. CONCEIVING THE MIND-BODY UNION. The correspondence between Elisabeth and Descartes, that begins already in 1643, is, in many ways, remarkable, not least because of the impact the questions of his young correspondent had on the philosopher, who at this point of life had completed what he considered a worked out philosophical system. From January 1643 to July 1644, Descartes was occupied with supervising the publication of his Principles of Philosophy. It is a time disturbed, among other things, by the affaire Voetius: while working on presenting his new philosophy in a pedagogical form acceptable to the schools, Descartes had to defend himself against its enemies, detractors and unfaithful followers.13 No wonder he is taken by the interest Elisabeth manifests in his teachings and by the acuity of the questions she raises. She goes right to the heart of the matter, when she asks Descartes in her first letter to explain “how the soul of man (being merely a thinking substance) can determine the spirits of the body to cause voluntary actions,” given that the only kind of causal action Descartes recognizes is that of impact. She also asks for a “definition of the soul, or its substance, separated from its action, from thinking,” a definition “more particular than the one given in your Metaphysics.” (AT III 661) Descartes, in his reply, confesses candidly “that the question your Highness proposes seems to be that which can most reasonably be asked given my published writings.” The answer seems to suggest that he had some solution to this problem that he had not thought of publishing before, having been principally concerned with proving the distinction between mind and body. He says he will try to explain how he conceives the mind-body union and the force by which the mind moves the body. (AT III 665, CSMK 218) Instead of explaining it, however, he invokes the distinction between three primitive notions and contents himself to compare the force through which the mind acts not with that through which bodies interact, but with the one by which qualities, like heaviness, are supposed by the Scholastics to act in bodies. Descartes did not think this answer would “entirely satisfy his correspondent” (AT III 668, CSMK 219). In fact, Elisabeth rejects it outright, excusing herself for her lack of time to meditate properly and her stupidity, which hinder her from understanding how the old idea of gravity, that Descartes has proved false, could make it easier to conceive the way the immaterial mind moves the body (AT III, 685). She writes:


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And I admit that it would be easier for me to concede matter and extension to the soul, than the capacity to move a body and be moved by it to an immaterial being. For, if the first took place through ‘information’, the spirits that cause it would have to be intelligent, which you accord to nothing corporeal. And even though in your Metaphysical Meditations you show the possibility of the latter, it is nevertheless very difficult to understand that a soul, as you have described it, after having had the faculty and habit of reasoning so well, can lose it all through some vapors, and that, although it can subsist without the body and has nothing in common with it, it is yet so ruled by it. (Elisabeth to Descartes, 20 June 1643, AT III 685)

Descartes, no doubt, is the loser here: in so far as he pretended to have an explanation of the how of the mind-body union, it turned out to be sheer pretence. The fact is it cannot be explained in Cartesian terms, for any attempt at explanation would involve a category-mistake, invoking notions belonging to another primitive notion: “...what belongs to the union of the soul and the body is known only obscurely by the intellect alone or even the intellect aided by the imagination, but it is known clearly by the senses.” People who “never philosophize and use only their senses have no doubt that the soul moves the body and that the body acts on the soul,” Descartes writes. “They regard both of them as a single thing, that is to say, they conceive their union, for to conceive the union between two things, is to conceive them as one single thing” (AT III 691-692, CSMK 227). 14 Descartes goes on to blame the excesses of metaphysical and mathematical thinking, which exercise only the intellect and imagination, for hindering Elisabeth from relying on her senses and “the ordinary course of life and conversation” that will teach her to conceive the union. One may wonder if Descartes could be serious in suggesting that Elisabeth is too much of a philosopher to understand what for ordinary people and commonsense lies in plain view. It would hardly occur to those who rely on their daily experience of mind-body interaction to treat the mind and the body as distinct substances. It is as if he were saying, forget about dualism and the problem will disappear. If by “philosopher” we mean someone who asks for reasons and explanations, it is in fact Elisabeth who seems, at this point, more true to the profession than her teacher. She is the one who insists on consistency, while Descartes seems to have given up on it. Descartes’s use of the term ‘conceive’ (conçevoir) in this connection is anything but helpful. For as he recognizes (in the same letter), it does not seem possible for the human mind to form a “very distinct conception both of the distinction between the soul and the body and their union; because that requires conceiving them as one single thing, and at the same time conceiving them as two, which is contradictory.” (AT III 693, CSMK 227.) He ends by conceding to Elisabeth her point, in begging her “to feel free to attribute this matter and extension to the soul.” For to do so is “simply to conceive it as united to the body.” He adds, somewhat enigmatically, that it

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will be easy for her, after having thus conceived the union, to consider that the matter she has attributed to thought (in order to conceive the union) is not thought itself, nor is its extension the same as the extension of thought (!), which has no determinate location and is not impenetrable. Your Highness, he assures her, will thus “easily be able to return to the knowledge of the distinction between the soul and the body in spite of having conceived their union....” (AT III 694, CSMK 228) The Passions of the Soul, which grew out of this correspondence, gives lots of examples of sliding back and forth between trying to conceive the mind as material or acting in the body, and trying to conceive it as distinct from the body and acting on or being acted upon by it as it were from the outside. The more one digs into the theory, however, the more difficult it becomes to understand at all how the mind could act independently of the body. Was Descartes himself clear about the implications of the doctrine he developed in answer to Elisabeth’s questions? It is clear, at least from her last words in the exchange concerning the difficulties she had raised for Descartes’s notion of the mind-body union, that he had not convinced her.15 And yet, like Descartes, she uses this problematic notion of the union as a framework for understanding our emotional and moral experience. She accepts it as a basis for the new medical approach to passions and uses it in her evaluation of the therapeutic strategies proposed by Descartes as remedies to her own problems.

4. THE POWER OF REASON. Let us now turn to the second difficulty raised by Elisabeth--the autonomy of reason and its power to master the turmoil caused by the body--which is a consequence of Descartes’s unsatisfactory treatment of the first. Again and again, in their later correspondence, Elisabeth finds herself forced to remind Descartes of what a frail and easily disturbed faculty human reason can be and to what extent it is at the mercy of the motions and states of the body in which it is immersed. The fact that she does so by appealing to her own particular moral experience and, notably, to her female sensitivities and “weaknesses”, by no means lessens their import. On the contrary, because she so frankly expresses her failures and her skepticism concerning the practical application and effects of the advice and moral precepts she gets from her friend, she forces him to revise them and rethink the conditions of their applicability. For Descartes, as the correspondence shows, starts out without much doubt about the power of reason over bodily disorders and behavior.


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The first time he mentions it is in a letter, probably dating from 1644, a year before the exchange we are going to look at started.16 Referring to a stomach malady Elisabeth suffered from and which she apparently had consulted him about earlier, he writes: The remedies which your Highness has chosen, diet and exercise, are in my opinion the best of all, after, however, those of the soul, which no doubt has great power over the body, as is shown by the great changes caused in the body by anger, fear and other passions. But it is not directly by its will that she directs the spirits to the places where they can be useful or harmful, it is only by willing or thinking of other things. For our body is so constructed that certain movements in it follow naturally from certain thoughts: as we see that blushes accompany shame, tears compassion, and laughter, joy. (AT V 65, CSMK 237)

As he here interprets the principle of “Natural Institution”,17 the thoughts most proper to the conservation of health are “a strong conviction and firm belief that the architecture of our bodies is thoroughly sound.” Did he suspect some part of hypochondria in Elisabeth’s illness? People, he says, fall ill and even die, because an astrologer or doctor has convinced them that they are going to die at a certain time, and he has seen it happen to several people.... But is it in our power to believe that our bodies are well or badly constructed? What reason, moreover, does Descartes have for being so confident that our beliefs about the state of our bodies matter in one way or another to its well-being? When Descartes learns a year later about Elisabeth’s continued illness-a persistent “slow fever, accompanied by a dry cough,”—he hesitates neither in his diagnosis nor in the remedy that he takes liberty to prescribe. Her disease, he infers, is due to the sadness and distress caused by the series of misfortunes suffered by her family. There is a remedy, however, and it is within her own power, for as soon as she sees what the causes of her indisposition are, he will be able to free herself from it. It is all a matter of rendering one’s “soul content, despite the disgraces of the fortune.” The recipe has an unmistakably stoic flavor, though Descartes hastens to remark that joy cannot be persuaded onto a person who encounters new subjects of sorrow everyday, and also that he is not “one of those cruel philosophers who wish their wise man to be insensible.“ (AT IV 201-202) The trick is to endure the afflictions and yet remain their master. This, however, is not within the power of everybody alike: ...It seems to me that the difference between the greatest souls and those who are base and common consists principally in the fact that common souls abandon themselves to their passions and are happy or unhappy only according as the things that happen to them are pleasant or unpleasant; by contrast, the greatest souls possess arguments so strong and powerful (raisonnements si forts et si puissants) that, although they also have passions, and indeed often more violent ones than ordinary people, their reason nonetheless always remains the master, and makes even the afflictions serve them, and contribute to the perfect

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happiness that they enjoy already in this life. (To Elisabeth, 18 May, 1645, AT IV 202, my emphasis)

What kind of arguments does Descartes have in mind? Those that help us keep the true order and value of things in mind, considering, for instance, that we (our minds) are immortal and second, but are joined to mortal and fragile bodies and need not, therefore, give more weight to the events of this life more than we do those of comedies. (AT IV 202) No more, no less, that is. Because we do as a matter of fact enjoy comedies. And just as the sad and lamentable stories we see represented in a theater often provide us with as much recreation as the cheerful ones, even though they call forth tears from our eyes, so too these greater souls of whom I speak find contentment, in themselves, from everything that happens to them, even the most vexing and unbearable ones. (AT IV 203 my emphasis) Like the Stoics, Descartes takes knowledge of the true value and ordering of things to help us distance ourselves from the events of our life that are painful. But unlike the Stoics, who would emphasize the necessity to become free from passions and indifferent not merely to adversities but to the joys of this life as well, Descartes thinks all the passions can be enjoyable. For just as the great souls can train themselves to endure physical pain with patience and take pleasure in the proof they hereby give of their strength, they can also feel compassion with their friends in their affliction and do everything they can, including risking their lives, to help them out. At the same time, their awareness of acting virtuously and doing their duty brings them more happiness than all the sadness afflicting them because of their compassion. (AT IV 203) The internal pleasure arises as much from experiencing one’s strength of nerves, as from the good conscience brought by being virtuous and charitable.18 Elisabeth does not find this of much help. She expresses her gratitude to Descartes for his generous kindness and concern, and assures him that none of the doctors who had come to see her and examine her symptoms daily had been able either to find its causes or to prescribe so salutary remedies as he was able to do from far away. At the same time she makes it clear that she finds his advice quite impracticable. She does it by deploring the weaknesses of her body, due to her sex, which makes it too sensitive to the afflictions of her soul (NB: it is her body that feels and suffers from the afflictions of the soul) and hinders it from being strong enough “to restore itself with the soul”. She points to the recurrent disasters that keep disrupting whatever peace of mind she manages to acquire by reasoning. Not because she would attach much importance to things depending on fortune or other people’s wills (like the restitution to her family of its power and position) but because she cannot regard the misfortunes of her


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family members under any other aspect than that of evil, nor consider without anxiety her own powerlessness to assist them “I think that if my life were entirely known to you, you would find more strange than the causes of this present malady, that a sensitive mind such as mine has been able to sustain itself for such a long time, among so many adversities, in so frail a body, having no advice save from her own reasoning and no consolation save her own conscience.” (Letter to Descartes, May 24 1645, AT IV 209.) Descartes now proposes a different cure: relaxation through the senses. Even if the technique recommended may be Stoic in origin, the end that it serves is not. For the point is not to get rid of one’s worries and achieve indifference, but to hinder them from causing more harm than necessary. He advises her not to think of the cause of her distress more than she has to, but only when “prudence forces one to do so,”19 and to spend the rest of her time distracting her imagination and senses as far from the subject as possible. She should imitate those “who in looking at the greenness of a wood, the colors of a flower, the flight of a bird, and such like, convince themselves that they are not thinking of anything.” That is not to waste one’s time, but to employ it well, in so far as it contributes to the recovery of perfect health, “which is the foundation of all the other goods one can have in this life.”20 Descartes adds that he has not said anything Elisabeth would not know herself, but points out that the difficulty lies in the practice, not in the theory, which he supports by an appeal to his own experience: ... I have experienced in myself (j’ai experimenté en moi-même) that an almost similar and even more dangerous disease has been cured by the remedy I have just suggested. Because I was born of a mother who died, a few days after my birth21, from a disease of the lungs, caused by distress, I inherited from her a dry cough and a pale colour which stayed with me until I was more than twenty, and which led all the doctors that saw me before that time to condemn me to die young. But I believe that the inclination I have always had to look at things presenting themselves from the angle that could make them the most agreeable to me, and to make my principal contentment depend only upon myself alone, have caused this indisposition, which seemed natural to me, gradually to disappear completely. (AT IV 220-1, CSMK 250-1).

Elisabeth, with her usual politeness, answers that she always finds Descartes’s letters an antidote against melancholy, even when they would not instruct her, because they divert her mind from the unpleasant objects that keep turning up before it everyday, “to make it [him, my mind!] contemplate the happiness I possess in the friendship of a person of your merit, to whose counsel I can commit the conduct of my life.” (My italics.) If only she could conform her life to his last precepts she would no doubt be cured from “the disease of the body and the weaknesses of the mind”.

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But to direct one’s thoughts the way Descartes recommends does not seem possible, for, she observes: ...I confess I find difficulty in separating from my senses and my imagination the topics, which continually get represented there by the conversations and letters I could not avoid without sinning against my obligations. I well appreciate that in excluding from the idea of a matter everything that makes it upsetting to me (which I believe I do represent to myself only by imagination), I would judge it as sanely and find remedies to it as quickly as I now do with all the affection I bring to it. But I have never known how to practice this except after the passion has played its role. There is something surprising in the misfortunes, even though foreseeable, that I can master only after a certain time, and by which my body becomes so greatly disordered, that it takes me several months to restore it, which barely pass without any new subject of trouble. (AT IV 234. My emphasis.)

Not only does she have a hard time directing her mind with care to keep it pleasantly occupied, since the slightest pretext (fainéantise) makes it fall back on the subjects causing its afflictions, but she is afraid that not employing it while taking the waters of Spa would make it even more melancholic.22 If only she could take advantage as Descartes does of all the things presenting themselves to her senses, she would enjoy herself without hurting her mind. For at this point, she confesses in one of her most striking remarks, .... I find the incommodity of having the capacity, a little, to reason. For, if I did not have any at all, I would find pleasures in common with those among whom I have to live, to take this medicine with profit. And if I had it as much as you do, I would cure myself as you have done. Add to this the curse of my sex, which deprives me of the happiness [FR. contentment] that a trip to Egmond, to learn the truths you have extracted from your garden, would bring me. (Letter to Descartes 22 June 1645, AT IV 234)

Descartes, again, has underestimated his correspondent, who would not content herself merely with any ordinary “relaxation through the senses”. It takes intellectually more demanding challenges to keep her mind occupied enough to distract it from her sorrows, as he recognizes in his answer. Having previously tried to persuade Elisabeth to some carelessness (FR. nonchalance), “thinking that occupations that are too serious may weaken the body by fatiguing the mind,” he now recommends diversions through studies “to turn her thoughts from topics that can sadden her”. He is also prepared to help in any way he can to make such exercises easier. (AT IV 237, CSMK 253) In his next letter, a month later, we find him suggesting to Elisabeth, as a useful means of distraction, the examination of precepts recommended by ancient philosophers for acquiring sovereign happiness. Since he has not been able to produce anything of his own on this subject that would be worthy of being read by Elisabeth, he proposes Seneca’s De vita beata as a useful starting-point for reflections. He also asks her to


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graciously share with him her “observations on this book”, which, in addition to instructing him, “would give him occasion to render his own more exact” (Letter to Elisabeth, 21 July 1645, AT IV 252-3, CSMK 256).23 For Garber the fact that Descartes recommends reading Seneca to Elisabeth is another proof that he treats her merely as a “learned maid”24. It clearly shows a concern to find for Elisabeth an occupation answering to her needs and predicament. But as the lines just quoted indicate it also shows willingness on his part to treat her as an equal. For in turning to the classics, Descartes admits his own ignorance of and his readiness to explore with her assistance a subject that, given the importance he accords to it in various programmatic statements, he really should have given more thought. The exchange of views that follows seems to confirm this.

5. “...EVEN MY FAULTS WILL GIVE YOU OPPORTUNITIES FOR OBSERVING THE TRUTH”. Having barely started their reading of Seneca, they agree it is not worth pursuing and that their own natural reason has more to teach them. Descartes is disappointed with Seneca because the way he treats the subject is not “sufficiently rigorous to deserve to be followed” (Letter to Elisabeth, AT IV 263, CSMK 257). Elisabeth for her part finds that the book fails to instruct her about the subject it is supposed to deal with and that it lacks “method”. Thus, “instead of showing the shortest path to happiness, he contents himself with showing that his fortune and luxury have not rendered him incapable of enjoying it”. She adds that it is not because she finds Descartes’s way of reasoning “more extraordinary” that she does not ask him to continue his correction of Seneca, but “because it is the most natural I have encountered, and does not seem to teach me anything new, except that I can extract from my mind knowledge that I had not yet noticed.” ((Letter to Descartes, August 6, 1645, AT IV 269) Could one have better evidence that Elisabeth herself saw their exchange as a case of doing philosophy in the ancient, Socratic sense of the word, as a common search for self-improvement and truth? Although the aim of philosophy, thus understood, is to reach knowledge about oneself, about what one does and can know using one’s proper reason, it takes two or more interlocutors to be successfully practiced. It requires someone willing not only to listen to your points of view and answer your questions, but who also cares enough to try to understand them, helping one to articulate them and make oneself, and one’s views, clearer. If Elisabeth forced Descartes to make an effort to clarify the difficulties she found in his

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views, he seems to have played a similar role for her, making her, as she puts it herself, aware of things she already knew or was able to discover by herself. The exchange that follows leaves little doubt that Elisabeth had views of her own, and it also shows her more confident in expressing them. For instance, she does not hesitate to question Descartes’s view that virtue, as he defines it (a right use of reason with a firm resolution to follow it) can lead to supreme contentment by itself, without the help of things that do not absolutely depend on one’s will. For, she insists, “there are maladies that completely deprive one of the power of reasoning and consequently of enjoying a reasonable satisfaction; others diminish the force of reasoning and prevent one from following the maxims dictated by good sense” so that they “make even the most moderate persons subject to let themselves be carried away by their passions...” (Letter to Descartes, August 16, 1645, AT IV 269)25 Such occasions are inevitably followed by regrets, which no knowledge concerning the fallibility and frailness of human nature could diminish. Elisabeth finally seems successful here in articulating her skepticism in a way which, (as Shapiro notes), also brings home the point to Descartes. He assures his correspondent that he could write nothing that she would not have noticed better than himself, if only she had had the leisure that he has had to think of this topic.26 He then grants her the observation about diseases that take away the power of reasoning and thereby also the means of enjoying proper to a rational mind, so that what he had previously declared true for everybody holds only for those who have the free usage of their reason and who, moreover, know the road to true happiness. (AT IV 282, CSMK 262) For “we cannot absolutely answer for ourselves except when we are in possession of ourselves; and to lose one’s life is less than losing the use of one’s own reason...”. Any other indispositions that make one prone to painful passions can be mastered, as long as they merely alter the “humors” without disturbing one’s judgement, and the same is true of “all external impediments, such as the splendors of high birth, the seductions of the court, the adversities of fortune and even its great prosperities, which can make it even more difficult than adversities to act as a philosopher”. (AT IV 283, CSMK 263) He seems to grant as much later, when writing that contentment depends on the mastery of one’s reason.27 From having defended a rather unqualified optimism with regard to the autonomy of reason, Descartes is brought here for the first time to admit that there are circumstances out of our control that can prevent its free use entirely. It took Spinoza to spell out the full implications of Descartes’s theory of emotions as body-dependent mental states, showing that it is an illusion to believe there are any circumstances where the radical freedom


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Descartes defends could be exercised. The autonomy he attributes to reason, as Spinoza never tires of pointing out, is nothing but another prejudice produced by our imagination concealing our ignorance of the real causes at work. The Cartesian theory of the mastery of emotions, that Spinoza says shows nothing except the cleverness of the mind of its author, grew out from the answers to Elisabeth’s questions. Elisabeth deserves credit for having been the first to see how little ground for optimism with regard to reason’s autonomy Descartes’s notion of the mind-body union really could offer. Descartes however does not here reflect further on the difficulty raised by his correspondent.28 Reverting to his dualism, he contents himself with invoking the distinction between two kinds of pleasure, those which belong to the “mind alone” and the others, “that belong to man (l’homme); that is to the mind in so far as it is united to the body;” (AT IV 284, CSMK 263). The latter, since they present themselves to the imagination and often appear greater than they are (especially before we possess them), are a source of evil and errors. Passions tend to make us believe some things to be better or more desirable than they are. According to the rule of reason, each pleasure should be measured by the size of the perfection causing it. The function of reason is therefore “to examine the just value of all the goods whose acquisition seems to depend in some way on our conduct, so that we never fail to devote all our efforts to trying to secure those which are in fact the most desirable” (AT IV 284-5, CSMK, 263-4). What constitutes the main difference between the pleasures of the mind and those of the body seems to be the solidity of the former: they “can be as immortal as the soul itself provided they are so solidly founded that neither knowledge of the truth nor false conviction can destroy them.” Those of the body, on the contrary, which is subject to perpetual change, do not last very long. (AT IV 286, CSMK 265). Elisabeth does not fail to point out difficulties again. How can one thus evaluate all goods? And how can one evaluate them without passion or natural inclinations in the way Descartes seems to recommend?29 Moreover, to rightly estimate them in the midst of an active life requires an infinite science: “In order to measure contentment according to the perfection it causes, it would be necessary to see clearly the value of each thing, whether those that serve only ourselves, or those that render us useful to others, are preferable.” But people seem to have very different inclinations here, which they back up with rational arguments, and that seems to be the case also with other perfections of the body and the mind, “that a tacit sentiment makes reason approve, which should not be called passion, because it is born with us.” Elisabeth does not seem to doubt that this sentiment, that she calls a “gift of nature” should be followed and

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seems to think it has a natural function. But how far should it be followed, and how can it be corrected if it leads astray? (Elisabeth to Descartes, Sept. 13, 1645, AT IV 289. My emphasis.)30 What is to be another central problem of The Passions of the Soul is first formulated here, again, by Elisabeth. The value of things, in particular those that are important for the mind-body union, are revealed to us through the passions. Yet they also tend to present things as more or less valuable or important than they are. To what extent should reason rely on the passions and can it operate independently of them? It is in this same letter that Elisabeth asks Descartes to define the passions, in order “to know them well; for those who call them perturbations of the soul, would persuade me their force consists only in blinding (éblouir) and subjecting reason, if experience would not show me that some passions incline us to reasonable actions.” (loc. cit.) Note how she does not hesitate to oppose her own experience to what would pass for common Stoic or Neo-Stoic wisdom, namely the view that passions are mere negative forces—false opinions— contrary to reason, hindering it from forming true evaluative judgments. The same points are repeated when she turns to the charge two weeks later, questioning the somewhat simplistic rational calculation in estimating amounts of perfection that Descartes recommended in his letter to Elisabeth, 1 September 1643 (AT IV 284-5, CSMK 263-264): “How can one measure the pains one takes in serving the public against the good that will ensue, without taking them for bigger, inasmuch as their idea is more distinct? And what rule shall we have for comparing things, which are not equally well known to us, as our own merit and that of those with whom we live? One who is naturally arrogant will always trip the balance in his favor, and one who is modest will esteem himself less than his worth.” (Letter to Descartes, 30 September 30, 1645, AT IV 303.) She also pushes Descartes on the consequences of using dualism as a basis for evaluation of what good to pursue. Among the things we need to know, Descartes writes, in order to get our priorities right, the first is that “God on whom all things depend, whose perfections are infinite, whose power is immense and whose decrees are infallible” is the highest of all perfections and the object most worthy of our love. The second is “the nature of our soul in so far as [en tant que] it subsists apart from the body, and is much nobler than it, and is capable of enjoying countless satisfactions not to be found in this life. For this will hinder us from fearing death, and so detaches our affections from the things of this world that we look upon whatever is in the power of fortune with nothing but scorn”. (Letter to Elisabeth, 15 September 1645, AT IV 292, CSMK 265-66) Taking this rhetoric to its consequences Elisabeth concludes: That we do not seem to have any good reason to remain attached to our bodies.


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Wouldn’t the knowledge of the immortality of the soul and its noble nature bring one to seek death and despise it since no doubt one “would live happier without maladies and passions of the body”? This leads her to express her astonishment that those who pretended to be convinced of these truths and lived without the faith of revelation would have preferred a painful life to an advantageous death. (Letter to Descartes, 30 September 1645, AT IV 302) While conceding the general point, Descartes observes that no reason guarantees that we will enjoy all sorts of felicities after this life, “and there is nothing to show that the present life is bad except the false philosophy of Hegesias” (who according to Cicero advocated suicide). True philosophy, on the contrary, teaches “that even amid the saddest disasters and the heaviest pains one can always find contentment in it, provided one knows how to use one’s reason” (Letter to Elisabeth 6 October, 1645, AT IV 315, CSMK 272) Elisabeth persists: if one is really persuaded of the immortality of the soul, “it is impossible to doubt that it would not be happier after the separation from the body (which is the cause of all unhappiness in life, as the soul is of the greatest contentment’s)....”. As for herself, she has no doubts that “even though life is not evil in itself, it ought to be abandoned for a condition one knows will be better.” (Letter to Descartes, 28 October 1645, AT IV 323) Descartes does not agree: .... leaving aside what faith teaches, I confess that by natural reason alone we can make a lot of conjectures to our advantage and have fine hopes, but we cannot have any certainty. And since the same natural reason also teaches us that we always have more good than evil in this life, and that we should never leave what is certain for the uncertain, it seems to me that it teaches that while we should not really fear death, we should never seek it either. (Letter to Elisabeth, 3 November 1645, AT IV 333, CSMK 277).

Descartes’s ethics is based not on faith, but on natural reason alone, and natural reason does not support the conclusions Elisabeth draws: it gives no certainty concerning life after death.31 He is therefore clearly not prepared to reject the pleasures of the body, in order to give priority to the uncertain hope of rewards in a possible next life over the joys one can find in this one. On the contrary, even though it is generally true that it is possible to become happy without the goods of the body, he does not think they should be “altogether despised”, “nor even that one should free oneself altogether from the passions. It is enough to subject one’s passions to reason; and once they have been thus tamed, they can sometimes be all the more useful the more they tend to excess.” (Letter to Elisabeth, September 1 1645, AT IV 287, CMSK 265.)32 The exchange between Elisabeth and Descartes, of which the excerpts here included are just a sample, show her repeatedly reminding Descartes of the real union between the mind and the body and how taking it

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seriously renders any traditional solutions to the reason-passions conflicts problematic or unworkable. At the same time she confronts him with the implications of his dualism and forces him to work on some kind of third alternative. She makes apparent the tension between the medicaltechnological approach to the passions and the Stoic voluntarism, which continues throughout the treatise on the Passions. This tension is in a way built into Stoic voluntarism itself, one side of which is the acceptance of the necessity of all things not in our power, another side of which is a firm conviction that our thoughts are absolutely in our power. In combining this faith with his principle of natural institution (according to which nature has joined each of our thoughts with certain bodily movements, but by which, with the help of habit or practice, we also can join them to others), Descartes converts his Stoic voluntarism into an unabashed optimism with regard to our power to master the passions. But the same principle of the natural institution, which is supposed to make reason’s control possible, also makes reason dependent on the body and its states. This results in the many inconsistencies and difficulties of his theory. Would Descartes have had anything more consistent to offer had he been given time to work out a moral philosophy? We do not know. We do know that he does not want to get involved in writing, publicly, about ethical matters. 33 Yet he seems confident that he has found some wisdom and clearly thinks his physics as well as his treatise on the Passions are relevant to ethics, in spite of the fact that he considers his physics incomplete and his treatment of human nature insufficient. In the letter to Chanut he remarks: .... I agree with you entirely that the safest way to find out how we should live is to discover first what we are, what kind of world we live in, and who is the creator of this world, But I cannot at all pretend or promise that all I have written is true, moreover there is a very great gap between the general notions of heaven and earth which I have tried to convey in my Principles, and the detailed knowledge of human nature, which I have not yet dealt with. However ... I will say in confidence that what little knowledge of physics I have tried to acquire has been a great help to me in establishing certain foundations in moral philosophy; and that I have found more satisfaction on this point than in many others concerning medicine, on which I have however spent much more time. So instead of finding ways of preserving life, I have found another, much easier and safer, which is not to fear death. (AT IV 441, CSMK 289)34

He adds that while letting the plants he wants to observe for his physics grow in his garden; he has used some time during the past winter to think about “particular problems in ethics” and has drafted “a little treatise on the nature of the passions of the soul”, without having the intention to publish it (AT IV 442, CSMK 289). This is the treatise he promised Elisabeth and that he later reworked into Les Passions de l’âme. Is Descartes saying that the knowledge of passions should help one master one’s fear of dying?


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Does the freedom to enjoy the passions that it teaches us announce the kind of freedom Spinoza thinks of in writing that a free man thinks of nothing less than dying? This is not a place for trying to answer these questions. The question here was whether the exchange between Descartes and Elisabeth is or is not to be considered a genuine philosophical dialogue, and whether or not Princess Elisabeth can aspire to the (dubious?) honor of being called a philosopher? Why would it matter one way or another—why, you may wonder, would one bother to ask, or answer such a question?

6. DOING PHILOSOPHY—NOW AND THEN Garber mentions as one motivation for studying the writings of Elisabeth and her female contemporaries, the need to find “our intellectual foremothers, and in so doing to rediscover intellectual heroes for modern women philosophers”-- women who “produced philosophical work of real significance” which “was ignored by the mainstream simply because of their gender”. In so far as Elisabeth is concerned, such an assumption is a delusion, Garber argues. While not entirely without interest, Elisabeth “cannot be regarded as an important or original thinker.”35 Although Garber may be right in this assessment, and although the contrast he draws between a philosopher and a learned maid is interesting in itself, I do not think it does justice to the relationship and exchange between the male philosopher and his female humanist pupil we have been considering. If it is true of a learned maid that she is not interested in abstraction and system, this is hardly true of Elisabeth, who showed so much interest in (and knowledge of) the Cartesian system and in general metaphysical questions like that of the nature and relationship between two mutually distinct and independent substances. If, on the other hand, it is true of Elisabeth that she, as a learned maid, was more interested “in the human reality of moral life, and the cultivation of the self, as opposed to the construction of systems”, it is not difficult to find important and original philosophical thinkers whom that same description would fit. It is of course still true that Elisabeth and Descartes think on the basis of completely different categories of discourse, categories that are far apart on social and political, including gender-political and gender-cultural, grounds. Elisabeth. barely knows how to formulate herself and apologizes for “this unruly style of mine” when starting the correspondence. We clearly need to take account of these differences, to give due weight to those forms of discourse—Elisabeth’s included—that do not fit the standards of professional philosophy, as Garber rightly urges. But it is equally important to see when and how given categories are transcended.

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The correspondence between Descartes and Elisabeth is a case in point, and Garber himself recognizes that Elisabeth, in the end, managed to trespass “into the domain of the real philosopher”36. In his last letter to Elisabeth, written from Stockholm (October 9 1649), Descartes describes the merits of the great Swedish Queen. He notes not only her extreme interest in letters and in the cultivation of the Greek language, but also her lack of knowledge in philosophy. He expresses doubt as to whether he will, because of this, be of any use to her and already thinks of when he can leave the place.... Elisabeth, as his true friend, comforts him—and herself—as follows: Do not think that such a favorable description would give me reason for jealousy. Rather, it gives me reason for more self-esteem than I had before she gave me the idea of a person so accomplished, that can absolve our gender (sexe) from the imputation of imbecility and feebleness, which Messieurs les pédants have wanted to give it. I’m sure that once she has tasted your philosophy, she will prefer it to their philology.” (AT V, 451) Not untypically for female thinkers, Elisabeth may for a long time have entertained doubts about her own ability to think philosophically and to reach up to the standards of her teacher, but it is not difficult to see how she gradually overcomes them. Descartes for his part seems never to have questioned that she was a philosopher, in what he thought was the true sense of the word, that of one who uses her own reason as best she can and who follows it once she has done all that is in her power to use it well. And while the remarks just quoted indicate that Descartes, after his first meeting with her, placed Christina in the category of the learned lady, there is no evidence for, and much against, thinking that he ever saw Elisabeth as belonging there. Indeed, he goes out of his way to show the contrary, and their correspondence gives evidence enough that he was fully justified in so doing. As much as we need to recognize unjustly neglected female intellectuals, it is as important to give their due to the few intellectual forefathers who have been unprejudiced enough to listen to and take seriously what women closed out from the philosophical forum had to say. It is time, I think, to join Descartes not only in acknowledging that Elisabeth deserves recognition but also in giving her the recognition she deserves for her own sake. She was not just another learned maid, not merely Descartes’s correspondent and resonance board but a thinker with a voice and questions of her own, questions that are interesting in their own right and not because they represent some particular feminine way of thinking. For although they clearly reflect her particular predicament, the concerns Elisabeth expresses are general enough even for a male philosopher like Descartes to recognize as his own.


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The correspondence between Elisabeth and Descartes, moreover, has many things to teach those who read it without prejudice about the ways in which philosophy can be practiced. For one can look at it as Elisabeth sees it herself, as a philosophical dialogue in the Socratic sense of a common search for self-knowledge and self-improvement, a search for truth too or, to use a metaphysically less loaded term, of clarification. It can be seen as an opportunity for critical rational discourse, for mutual giving and asking for reasons, a shared effort to articulate, clarify and reflect on one’s own views or commitments, to find some common understanding of things one can mutually accept and commit oneself to. That one should have a view or system to defend at the start is not essential to this way of practicing philosophy. On the contrary, starting out with a position to defend tends to obstruct and pervert philosophy, in the way Plato can be said to have perverted the Socratic method of discourse, in reducing, in his later dialogues, opponents to mere listeners having nothing to contribute beyond repeating their consent to whatever the philosopher’s voice proposes. Elisabeth and Descartes start out in a spirit more faithful to Socrates himself, by mutual recognition of a difficulty (that of understanding the mind-body problem) from which they go on to explore a topic of common interest (how to improve one-self and live well), on which neither has yet any systematically worked out answers to offer. This, more than anything else, is what makes it possible for them to achieve that state of mutual trust and candidness, where a genuine dialogue can take place.37 But one can also look at their exchange as a form of a mutual therapy or cure, equally beneficial to both its participants. Elisabeth is the one who asks for help and guidance, and while she does not know how to apply and follow the often high-minded advice she gets from her philosopher friend, the very practice of philosophy in which the exchange with Descartes engages her, turns out in itself to be a most salutary therapy in her struggle to master the pain inflicted by the accidents of her life. So if the general moral principles Descartes recommends are of little help against the miseries of life, just arguing about them turns out to have the most beneficial effects, in so far as it keeps her from thinking about the disasters afflicting her family which, in spite of all her efforts, she is powerless to prevent. The enjoyment is mutual, for being able to share her reflections and questions and to share with her some of his own seems to give Descartes as much delight as it give her comfort. If doing philosophy means working out or trying to understand metaphysical systems, then Elisabeth’s experience, the one she shares with her friend Descartes, may teach us that doing philosophy is not something we can -because of our embodied condition—do more than now and then. We may learn from Descartes’s remarks to Elisabeth that philosophy is

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something one should do only now and then—a few hours a year at most!38 On the other hand, if one thinks of philosophy as an ongoing dialogue between people who share some common intellectual problems and unclarities and who are committed to do their best in helping each other to solve them or to clarify the difficulties, then it certainly seems worthwhile pursuing more often, now as then.39

NOTES 1

Like, for instance, the “cartésiennes” frequenting the Parisian salons described in Erika Harth, Cartesian Women, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, N.Y., 1992. 2 Daniel Garber, “Elisabeth of Bohemia: A Learned Maid?” (unpublished) and Lisa Shapiro, “Elisabeth, Descartes, and the Passions of the Soul”, papers presented at the conference Seventeenth Century Women Philosophers held at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in November 1997. I am grateful to both Dan Garber and Lisa Shapiro for letting me read their manuscripts. For a revised version of the latter see Lisa Shapiro, “Princess Elisabeth and Descartes: The Union of Soul and Body and the Practice of Philosophy”, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 7 (3) 1999:503-520. 3 Garber is not explicit on what that mold is supposed to be, but seems to think of philosophy primarily as systematic theory building. Daniel Garber, “Elisabeth of Bohemia: A Learned Maid?” manuscript, p. 4. 4 Desmond Clarke, “Anna Maria van Schurman....”, paper given at the Conference “Seventeenth Century Women in Philosophy”, University of Amherst, November 1997. 5 De ingenii mulieribus ad doctrinam, et meliores litteras aptitudine, published the same year and at the same publisher as Descartes’s Meditations, Elzevier, Amsterdam 1641. 6 Garber, manuscript, pp. 4-9. 7 The last quote is from Elisabeth’s Letter to Descartes, 1 July 1643, AT IV 2. 8 Quoted from Lisa Shapiro, manuscript p. 7, cf. Shapiro “Princess Elisabeth and Descartes”, pp. 506-508. 9 See the Letter to Pollot, quoted below note 11. 10 That Descartes was concerned to include also women in his audience appears also from his remark in the Letter to Vatier, 22 February 1638, ATI 560, CSMK 86. 11 He writes: “I set far more store by her judgment than those of the learned doctors whose rule is to accept the truth of Aristotle’s views rather than the evidence of reason”, To Pollot, 6 Oct. 1642, AT III 577, CSMK 215. 12 We read, in one of his letters to Elisabeth (November 3 1645): “So seldom do good arguments come my way, not only in the conversations I have in this desert, but also in the books I consult, that I cannot read those which occur in Your Highness’s letters without feeling an extraordinary joy; and I find them so strong, that I would rather confess to be defeated by them than attempt to resist them.” AT IV, 350, CSMK, 276. See also the introduction of J.-M. Beyssade and Michelle Beyssade to their edition of Rene Descartes, Correspondance avec Elisabeth et autres lettres, Paris: GF Flammarion, 1989. 13 See Descartes’s correspondence during this time, and the notes of Alquié to this correspondence, in F. Alquié (ed.) Oeuvres de Descartes, vol. III. See also Stephen Gaukroger, Descartes-An Intellectual Biography, Oxford, Clarendon Press 1995, p. 386 if.

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My emphasis. I have discussed elsewhere what Descartes here describes as a third kind of knowledge but which seems to be a direct, lived experience of acting and being acted upon, rather than knowledge in any usual sense of the word. At best, I have suggested, it could be described as some kind of tacit knowledge, or, rather, know-how, one that shows itself in our behavior rather than in any body or system of explicitly formulable, propositional beliefs or instructions. See my “Descartes’s Dualism and the Philosophy of Mind”, Revue de metaphysique et de morale, No. 3, p. 391-413, and Descartes’ s Concept of Mind, Chapter III, Harvard University Press,2003. 15 She writes: “I find too that the senses show me that the soul moves the body; but they do not teach me (any more than the understanding or the imagination) the manner in which it does it. And therefore I think that there are properties of the soul unknown to me, which might perhaps reverse what your Metaphysical Meditations, through so good arguments, have persuaded me...” Elisabeth To Descartes, 1 July 1643. It is not clear what view of the mind-body union Elisabeth herself would defend. She seems too much committed both to Descartes’s dualism and to his mechanistic view of the bodily functions, to go back to the Aristotelian model of the mind informing the body. Her later correspondence shows, on the other hand, that she is too much of a dualist to accept any materialist identity-theory, that is, she clearly is committed to the idea that the mind is at least in some respect independent of the body. She does not seem taken at all neither by Hobbes nor Gassendi, and finds that the latter, in spite of all his science, presents, after Hobbes, the most unreasonable objections to Descartes’s Meditations. See Elisabeth to Descartes, May 1647, and 5 December 1647, AT V 48 and 97. What she seems to be looking for herself, is, as Lisa Shapiro has argued, a richer notion of substance, or more exactly, of the attributes of the substances composing the mind-body union, which would avoid reductivist materialism as well as the strong dualist position of the Meditations. For while she grants that reason has some power over the emotions, she wants to argue that the exercise of this power depends on the states of the body to a much greater extent than Descartes had seen. See Lisa Shapiro, “Princess Elisabeth and Descartes:” 16 On the dating of this letter, that AT dates July 1647, see F. Alquié, Oeuvres III, p. 79n. 17 First enounced in Meditations VI and used in the Passions as the basis for the mastery of passions. In the latter Descartes also seems to recognize, as a result, I presume, of Elisabeth’s questioning, the limitations this very principle puts on the power of reason. (Ref.??) For it is not just that certain movements in the body follow from certain thoughts, it works as well the other way too, as Elisabeth’s frequent appeals to her own experience brings home to Descartes. Bodily movements – not only some vapors - change the course of our thoughts, and it is not just a matter of wanting to think of something else as Descartes letter to Elisabeth suggests. 18 This idea is echoed in Descartes’s remarks about so-called interior emotions aroused by plays or novels in the Passions of the Soul. He there compares them to the feelings caused through mere nervous stimulation - like tickling or pain. Tickling is often followed by joy, and pain by sadness, and the joy and sadness are explained in art. 94 as follows. The very same neural stimulation, experienced as pleasant tickling, could cause considerable pain, if they were stronger, or conversely, if our nerves were not strong or well disposed enough to resist the pain they could cause. Tickling thus creates an impression in our brains, instituted by nature to indicate this good disposition of the body, and hereby makes us (our souls) cheerful. “It is almost the same reason which makes one naturally enjoy feeling moved by all sorts of passions, even sadness and hate, when these passions are caused merely by the strange adventures one sees represented on the stage, which since they cannot harm us in any way, seem to tickle our soul in moving us.” (AT XI 399, art, 94. My emphasis.) The tickling

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which is a light stimulation makes us feel good, whereas too much stimulation gives us pain, just because they indicate the strength or lack of strength of our neural system. In the same way, presumably, we are supposed to enjoy the strength of our own character when overcoming our sadness and compassion for friends in distress in order to assist them. See also Descartes’s letter to Elisabeth, 1 September 1645, AT IV 283, CSMK 263. 19 He writes: “I can readily understand how many things must continually distress Your Highness, and I know that they are more difficult to overcome when they are of such a kind that true reason does not command us to oppose them directly and try to chase away them. They are domestic enemies against whom, because we are forced to talk with them (FR. converser), we must be perpetually on our guard to hinder them from injuring us; and I know only one remedy for this, which is to distract ones imagination and senses from them as far as possible, and to use only one’s intellect to consider them, when prudence forces one to do so. (AT IV 218, CSMK 249) 20 To illustrate how the health of the body is affected by the imagination and the senses Descartes describes a person who deliberately spends all his time absorbed by considering tragedies and sad or pitiful objects. Letting imaginary events move him and draw tears from his eyes all the time, without ever touching his intellect, would be enough to affect his blood and lungs to cause “a cough which in time could be dangerous”. Whereas a person who had countless genuine reasons for distress but took pains to divert her imagination from them and never thought of them except when forced by the events, “using all the rest of her time to consider only objects that could bring her contentment and joy” would be not only in a position to judge more sanely about things that matter to her, because she would look at them without passion, but would also be cured from the poor condition of her spleen and lungs caused by sadness. (AT IV 220, CSMK 250) 21 In reality she died 13 months later! 22 Waters from Spa that her doctors had recommended her to take during a month were transported to her residence in La Haye “without getting spoiled”, Elisabeth To Descartes, 24 May 1645, and AT IV 208. 23 Suggestion which, given what Descartes in other contexts says of the writings of the ancients, clearly shows that in spite of the importance he accords in the preface to the Principles to an ethics founded on solid basis, he had not yet worked out any moral system of his own, and that he did not feel confident to do so. Cf. the note of Alquié, in Oeuvres de Descartes, III, and p. 585 n. 1. 24 Given Descartes’s usual low opinions of the ancients, Garber cannot think of any other motive in turning to them than the belief that this was what he “thought the appropriate way to philosophize with a learned maid.” Garber, “Elisabeth of Bohemia: A learned Maid?” manuscript p. 10-11. 25 Descartes, in his commentary to Seneca, had divided the things that can make a life happy, in the sense of supreme contentment (FR. béatitude), into two classes: “those which depend on us, like virtue and wisdom, and those which do not, like honors, riches and health” and declares that the latter should not be of concern here: “to seek the other sort would be a waste of time, since it is not in our power” (AT IV 264-5, CSMK, 257). Whereas contentment of the first kind, i.e., true happiness, can be obtained by any person by herself without expecting anything from elsewhere, provided one observes the three things to which the three moral rules in his Discourse on the Method are pertinent. The first is “to employ one’s mind as well as one can to discover what one should do in all the circumstances of life.“ The second to have a “a firm and constant resolution to carry out whatever reason recommends without being diverted by one’s passions or appetites”. The third is to consider that “while one thus guides oneself, as much as one can, according to reason, all the good


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things which one does not possess are all equally outside one’s power, and that by this means, one will accustom oneself not to desire them.” Virtue, he believes, consists precisely in the firmness of this resolution to thus follow one’s reason, “although no one as far as I know has ever so described it.” (AT IV 265, CSMK 258.) Sticking firmly to one’s resolution to carry out what reason recommends, even when it turns out, afterwards, that we have gone wrong, will not fail to make us content, because having followed our reason, we have done the best we can, (“we have left undone nothing that was in our power“), and will therefore not have any grounds for repentance. “For nothing can impede our contentment except desire and regret and repentance;...” (AT IV 266, CSMK 258). 26 But, he continues, since circumstances (her age, birth and occupations) have not permitted this, he hopes that what he writes will save her some time, and that “even my faults will give you opportunities for observing the truth”. (AT IV 281, CSMK 262) 27 Cf. the remark in his letter of October 6 1645 that one can always be content in one’s life “if only one knows how to use one’s reason” - even among the saddest accidents and the hardest pains. AT IV 315, CSMK 272. 28 The worry is however echoed in many places in the Passions of the Soul, e.g., Articles 4649. 29 We read at the end of the letter from Descartes just quoted: “The true function of reason, then, in the conduct of life is to examine and consider without passion the value of all perfections, both of the body and of the soul, which can be acquired by our conduct, so that since we are commonly obliged to deprive ourselves of some goods in order to acquire others, we shall always choose the better.” AT IV 286-7, CSMK 265, my emphasis. 30 Cf. what Descartes says later about the importance of following one’s secret inclinations. 31 Descartes’s proof of the mind-body distinction, recall, has a modal conclusion: it merely shows that mind and body can exits independently of another. Whether God wills the soul to survive the body is another question that belongs to faith and to which natural reason gives no answer. 32 Cf. the Letter to Elisabeth, 15 September 1645, AT IV, 292, and the following, passage from an earlier letter: “...the right use of reason, by giving us a true knowledge of the good, prevents virtue from being false; and even accommodating it to licit pleasures, renders its practice so easy, and by making us know the condition of our nature, so limits our desires, that we must admit the greatest happiness of a man depends upon his right use of the reason, and consequently the study which leads to its acquisition is the most useful occupation one can have, as it is also certainly the most agreeable and delightful.” 4 August 1945, AT IV 267, CSMK 258. 33 To Chanut, November 1 1646, AT IV 536, CSMK 299. 34 Descartes obviously has given up his earlier hopes concerning the great benefits of medicine; see the letters to Huygens, December 4, 1637 and June 6, 1639. 35 Garber, “Elisabeth of Bohemia:” manuscript, p. 36 Garber, “Elisabeth of Bohemia:” manuscript, p.12. 37 There surely are other explanations of the trust they show each other - Elisabeth in revealing her moral and physical weaknesses, Descartes in taking also her difficult questions seriously, instead of feeling threatened by them. Here surely the fact that she is not in the profession plays an important role: she is not out to get him, nor is he out to impress or silence her. But whatever explanation one wants to give of this, it is hard to deny that the correspondence shows that they do show each other an unusual trust - given the disparity of their conditions and age. 38 Letter to Elisabeth, 28 June 1643, AT III 629, CSMK 227.

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39

This paper was presented at the Conference “Time and Truth” honoring André Gombay, Department of Philosophy, University of Toronto, 24-25. April 1998, and is a revised version of a paper given as an opening address at The Fourth Nordic Conference for Women in Philosophy”, Roskilde University Center, Denmark 3-5 April 1998.

REFERENCES Alanen, Lilli. “Descartes’s Dualism and the Philosophy of Mind.” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, 3 (1989): 391-413. Alanen, Lilli. Descartes’s Concept of Mind, Cambridge, Ma: Harvard University Press. 2003. Descartes, René. Correspondance avec Elisabeth et autres lettres, ed. Jean-Marie Beyssade and Michelle Beyssade. Paris: GF Flammarion, 1989. Descartes, René. Oeuvres de Descartes, ed. Chalres Adam and Paul Tannery, 12 vols. Paris:Vrin, 1964-1976. Descartes, René. Oeuvres philosophiques de Descartes, ed. F. Alquié , 3 vols. Paris: Editions Gamier Frères, 1963-1973. Gaukroger, Stephen, Descartes - An Intellectual Biography, Oxford: Clarendon Press 1995.

SOME THOUGHTS ON THE PLACE OF WOMEN IN EARLY MODERN PHILOSOPHY

Lisa Shapiro (Simon Fraser University, Canada)

… reading good books is like having a conversation with the most genuinely virtuous people of past ages, who were their authors – indeed, a rehearsed conversation in which they reveal to us only the best of their thoughts. --René Descartes, Discourse on the Method (AT VI 5) “I assure you,” said Horace, “that even though everyone talks, few people know how to talk.” --Madeleine de Scudéry, ‘De parler trop ou trop peu et comment il faut parler’, Conversations

I At least since the mid-eighteenth century, the story of philosophy has been one in which women have gone missing.1 To see that this is so now, one need only look at contemporary anthologies of philosophical works. While influential contemporary articles written by women are often included, from the looks of your average anthology, it would seem that there were no women doing philosophy, or at least any philosophy of significance, prior to, say, Elizabeth Anscombe, or perhaps Simone de Beauvoir and Hannah Arendt.2 For the purposes of this paper, I take as uncontroversial the feminist point that the absence of women from the story philosophy tells of itself is problematic.3 Indeed, it is a basic presupposition of this paper that it is a problem demanding remedy, for my concern here is just this remedy. 219 L. Alanen and C. Witt (eds.), Feminist Reflections on the History of Philosophy, 219-250. © 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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But as I consider ways of situating, or perhaps better, re-situating, women thinkers in the history of philosophy, I do want these strategies to be responsive to those who might find this point controversial. I focus my attention on a particular, and a particularly narrow, historical period—the early modern period, roughly 1600-1740 in Europe—for several reasons. For one, what is true of the history of philosophy generally is equally true of the history of philosophy of the early modern period. Moreover, the problem of how to resituate the women thinkers of this period has become of immediate importance. In recent years there have been tremendous efforts to resuscitate the works of women of the early modern period. Whereas twenty-five years ago, it might have been safely said that most philosophers working on the period were largely unaware of women’s writings of the 17th and 18th centuries, now not only are there anthologies of excerpts of the works of these women, along with a growing body of literature critically appraising them,4 there are also a growing number of re-editions of the works themselves.5 We are thus no longer faced with a picture of early modern philosophy as a landscape largely barren of women thinkers, and the list of women whose names are recognizable is growing. But to say that many of us can now recognize these women’s names amongst the men’s is not to say that we know what to make of their work. Until we have a story to tell about them, a way of incorporating them into the history of modern philosophy, we run the risk of their going missing once again. That is, as Eileen O’Neill writes, “we are at a point … where a rewriting of the narrative of philosophy is called for— one in which a number of the women cited here, and some of the forgotten men, will emerge as significant figures.”6 While there is no guarantee that a consideration of women thinkers of this period will be salient to a consideration of women thinkers of other periods or that the proposed remedies to the exclusion of women from the history of early modern philosophy generalize to other periods, I still hope that working through some of the issues of this period can be useful to addressing this problem in this history of philosophy more generally. I begin by noting the importance of continuing with archival work, and then turn to address the central question of how to rework the narrative of philosophy so as not only to include the writings of these women but also to ensure that this inclusion endures. I first consider some relatively conservative approaches to this task. For one might think that we can simply stick to the story we already tell and weave women thinkers into it. I argue that while this strategy can be quite effective in the short term, its long term success depends on our being able to justify including the particular women figures we do rather than others who have been historically neglected. Evidence of the causal influence of these women’s

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works could well provide such a justification, yet it can seem that the very neglect of women’s writings indicates that their work had little influence. Consideration of a particular case in which women’s writings were clearly influential leads me to consider some less conservative approaches to resituating women within the history of early modern philosophy. First, I suggest that we might shift the questions we take as framing philosophical inquiry to align with those questions many women thinkers have taken as compelling. I also suggest that modeling philosophy, and so too the history of philosophy, as a good conversation can afford women thinkers’ voices, as well as those of many others, occasions to be heard. We need to learn how to converse well with figures from our philosophical past, just as we aim to converse well with our contemporaries. I present my thoughts here as just that: thoughts. There are several reasons for this. Most centrally, it seems to me that any ideas one might have for bringing women back into the history of philosophy need to be put to the test by being put into practice, to see whether they get a grip on our philosophical self-conceptions. Equally, the merits of particular proposals hang on the details of content that only further study and debate can help clarify. With this disclaimer aside, I hope that the thoughts I put forward here spur others to think about the problems presented here, help them to formulate their own thoughts about how best to re-situate women thinkers in the history of early modern philosophy, and, perhaps more importantly, move them to read the works of the women thinkers mentioned here, as well as the many others our history has neglected.

II I am assuming here that the most effective way to ensure the continued presence of women in the history of philosophy is to have a way of weaving them into the ‘narrative’ of philosophy. For it seems that this is how thinkers find their way into our philosophical self-conceptions, and once a thinker finds her way in, she is likely to stay for some time. It is still worth issuing a reminder here that the first step in this process, no matter which strategy one pursues, is to continue with the work already underway, of retrieving and making readily available philosophical works by women. While, as I already noted, a growing number of works by women are being reprinted, there are some clear lacunae.7 In many cases, what is most readily available are excerpts.8 While this state of affairs might not be an insurmountable problem for scholars, it does pose real problems for affording non-specialists a degree of familiarity with these works. And so long as non-specialists have no ready access to these works, the chances of

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these women figuring in our history of philosophy are slim, if for no other reason, the number of those familiar with the content of these women’s writings will be slim. So long as only a few are aware of these works, I suspect that the works will not be folded into common philosophical discourse. Documenting and cataloging the philosophical works of women in this way amounts to what Richard Rorty has called doxography.9 Doxography has the advantage of instilling in us a familiarity with the ideas of philosophers of the past, and so enables these thinkers to leave an enduring mark on intellectual history. And so a new doxography, like that of early modern women philosophers, can serve to bring a variety of new figures into our philosophical view. As Rorty notes, “new doxographies usually started off as fresh, brave, revisionist attempts to dispel the dullness of the previous doxographic tradition.”10 They serve a kind of archaeological function, unearthing works, allowing them to see the light of day, and so allowing us to see our intellectual past from a new perspective. However, as Rorty also notes, if left as a simple catalog, this attempt to refresh our understanding of our past fast becomes stale itself, if not inspiring of “boredom and despair”, leaving the figures whose works it aims to highlight, lifeless and “mummified.”11 Doxography on its own may be necessary, but it is insufficient. And so, while it is absolutely essential to continue the archival work and process of reissuing and translating texts, those interested in rehabilitating women thinkers need something more. And I would suggest that with respect to these women thinkers we need something more sooner rather than later. For having spent the effort to exhume them and their works from the archives, leaving them to be ‘mummified’ can only result in a re-interment of their works in the depths of the stacks, along with them. The problem then is not only to retrieve the works of women philosophers, but to find a way of weaving them into the narrative of philosophy.

III Since the problem is immediate, it is tempting to solve it by sticking to the story one has been telling all along—the one that takes as its key figures a set of male philosophers—and to introduce some women characters along the way. For this strategy seems the most efficient. One can make the simple move of inserting a new text or a choice bit of text into what has come to be the canon of the early modern period at the appropriate point chronologically. And while this approach might certainly serve to bring women thinkers into view quickly, it might also serve another purpose. Part


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of the problem of working women thinkers into the story of philosophy is finding threads with which to weave them in. But these threads are even harder to find the less we are familiar with the writings of these women. Fitting these women into the chronology of early modern intellectual history can help familiarize us with their works, and with this new familiarity one might well hope some thicker thread connecting these works with more canonical ones will emerge. This very promise of finding some thicker thread, however, reveals the shortcomings of this sort of approach. As things stand, the works of women are simply added to the list of those already being read.12 While there are clear feminist reasons to include them, no such reasons internal to the philosophical concerns at issue are clearly articulated. It can seem as though these women are being read simply because they are women, and not because of the content of their philosophical writings. Because the internal philosophical reasons are not clear, we are left with a number of puzzles about the women thinkers we include, and these puzzles threaten to undermine the feminist reasons—the reasons external to the philosophical concerns at issue—we had for including them in the first place. For insofar as internal philosophical reasons for including these women remain unclear, it can seem that there are no good internal philosophical reasons for reading these women.13 So, while this strategy might weave women into the story of philosophy quickly, the narrative thread it affords is too thin. The characters of these women, or better, of their writings, are just not well-developed, and so we are left wondering what they are doing in the picture. It can seem as if they are just cluttering things up, and so obscuring the point, that is, the philosophical lessons to be learned. Insofar as they are doing that, it might seem that they should be edited out.

IV One way to try to resolve this problem is to find good internal philosophical reasons for bringing these women into the narrative—a stronger thread, as it were. And within the story of early modern philosophy as it stands, it does not seem particularly hard to find such a thread. For the work of many of the women thinkers listed above bears on that of the currently canonical figures of the early modern period. So, as is well known, Elisabeth of Bohemia corresponded with Descartes about the relation between the two really distinct substances of mind and body.14 Margaret Cavendish, in her Philosophical Letters, addresses herself to Descartes’ conception of the physical world, as well as that of Hobbes and Van Helmont. Astell, in correspondence with John Norris, considers the

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doctrines of occasionalism, and in Part II of her Serious Proposal to the Ladies, a work in which she advocates for women’s education, she puts forward a Cartesian account of the workings of the human understanding and a nativist account of knowledge. In her correspondence with Leibniz, Damaris Masham takes on his theory of simple substances, and his metaphysics more generally. She also responded to Astell’s correspondence with Norris. Leibniz describes his own account as agreeing with that Anne Conway puts forward in The Principles of Ancient and Modern Philosophy. Locke praised Catherine Trotter Cockburn’s explication of his work in her Defence of Mr Locke’s Essay of Human Understanding. And it is not only the case that these women interacted with those we take to be key figures in early modern philosophy, it is also the case that they are engaged with precisely the questions of metaphysics and epistemology that we take to be at the heart of the philosophy of this period. One might thus think it should be easy enough to introduce women thinkers into the canon of early modern philosophy. In considering Descartes’ conception of the human being and the problems it faces, one can read Elisabeth’s correspondence with him on just this matter. In presenting the Cartesian account of the physical world as divested of all but efficient causes, one can look to Cavendish’s criticism of Cartesian physics and her own positive vitalist account of causation. In critically evaluating Locke’s empiricist account of human understanding, one can not only look at Leibniz’s New Essays but also at Cockburn’s defense of Locke. And there are many other alternatives. This general approach seems to be the way many interested in bringing women into the canon of early modern philosophy are inclined to go.15 So, let us consider in more detail what this strategy for including women offers us. The first thing to notice is that this strategy is somewhat conservative: it leaves the story of philosophy as it stands intact. On this line, the internal reasons which weave women into the narrative arise from these women’s engagement with the issues in early modern philosophy we currently take as most relevant to our contemporary philosophical interests: the conception of the physical world, accounts of causation, the nature of thought, the representationality of ideas. However, in thinking about the relevance of its history to contemporary philosophy, we motivate these issues by taking certain canonical figures as holding representative positions. According to the way we as a discipline set things up, the works of Descartes, Locke and Leibniz, and perhaps of Malebranche, are important precisely because they allow us to frame a set of questions which are still open today. So long as we want to continue to set up the same questions, that is, to tell the same story, we do well to keep the same central characters.


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In retaining this commitment, however, this strategy for weaving women into the story faces some problems. First, in the pedagogical context, there is the straightforward problem of available space and time: how practical is it to make a point of bringing women into the mix? Consider the task of constructing an early modern philosophy course that might include these women thinkers. So long as we continue to tell more or less the same story, and retain a serious level of engagement with the texts, in the course of a term, we could bring in one or two of these women at most. That, in and of itself, need not be a problem. We need to leave out many other philosophers as well in this context. How many courses in early modern philosophy include Malebranche, let alone More, Bayle, and Condillac just to name a few? While we might face the question of why we include one typically neglected figure rather than another—why include Astell, say, rather than More?—the same form of question would confront us in any non-traditional choice of whom to include: why More rather than Condillac? It can seem that pointing to a personal interest can provide an immediate answer to these questions, and so it can seem perfectly fine to offer feminist reasons for including some women. Yet including these women because they are women has its dangers. For one, given the wholesale omission of women from the history of philosophy, in introducing one or two women into the narrative, we can give the misleading impression that the women engaged with philosophical issues were few and far between. This danger can be avoided easily enough by adverting to other female figures along the way, just as we might allude to, say, More, in passing. However, there is also another, even greater risk: that of diminishing the intellectual value of the contributions of the women we single out. For on this model, the central characters in the philosophical story are still men. Indeed, on the particular proposal currently under consideration, women thinkers are worked in just insofar as they are responsive to the works of those central characters, whether that be in correspondence with those figures, or those who followed them (such as Norris), or in works which address what we take to be canonical texts. The women are thus secondary or supporting characters. While it may just be true that women thinkers played this sort of role—indeed, it seems reasonable to think that most thinkers, men and women alike, even today, play this sort of role—we run the risk of presenting women thinkers as playing only supporting roles. While being a good worker and carrying out the program of their male mentors or correspondents is perhaps a noble role, it is nevertheless a lesser one, and we can be left with a distinct impression of women as capable but always in this lesser role.

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And there is another problem as well. If these women are workers serving the ends of developing and promoting a philosophical program rather than originating it, it is not clear why we should highlight their place in philosophical history. There are plenty of thinkers, women and men alike, whose efforts contributed in small but substantive ways to the development of what we now take to be the central philosophical views. We are thus thrust back into the question of justifying inclusion of them rather than others.16 While we can certainly justify focusing on women thinkers now by appealing to of the historical exclusion of any women from the history of philosophy, this will not do as a long term strategy. We need a stronger justification for highlighting those we do. For at a certain point we will need to explain why we continue to focus on the women to the exclusion of other comparable figures. This strategy, as it stands, does not seem to have sufficient resources to afford such an explanation. That is, it seems we have not yet articulated an adequate reason internal to the philosophical story for turning to these women.

V What sorts of reasons would constitute adequate ones for bringing these women (or perhaps others) into the canon of early modern philosophy? It may be useful here to think about how the canonical figures in our history of philosophy have come to be so. One might begin by suggesting that at minimum the philosophers we take as canonical have causal influence. That is, their works have played a causal role in the development of philosophical thought. So, on the standard story, Descartes’ works certainly influenced so-called Cartesians, such as Malebranche, insofar as they took themselves to be further articulating, clarifying and promoting, the philosophical vision of Descartes. More significantly, however, is the influence of Descartes on those who aimed to correct his errors. Spinoza and Leibniz both read Descartes and developed their own metaphysics and philosophical program from what they took to be misguided, if not outright ridiculous, in Descartes’ program. Equally, Locke’s work is seen as driving the development of an empiricist account of human understanding and cognition. For Berkeley and Hume both aimed to preserve the basic account of the epistemic primacy of perception while correcting for the errors along the way. But have women’s writings played a causal role in the progress of philosophy? On the face of it, it can seem that they have not played a substantial one. That women thinkers appear to play but supporting roles contributes to this impression. And one can easily imagine an


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unsympathetic colleague maintaining that if women’s writings had proven influential in efforts to answer the questions we take to be at the core of philosophy—questions of metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, ethics—it would seem that they would not have dropped out of the canon so wholly. Perhaps a kind of sexism, or the kind of slippage between ‘feminine work’ and women’s work that Eileen O’Neill points to,17 could explain how the significance of writings by women came to be downplayed, but, it might be argued, if the works were truly substantially influential, it would be hard to achieve the degree of disappearance of the works that indeed was effected. I will return to reconsider whether the influence of women’s writings on currently core philosophical questions was insubstantial shortly, but before doing so I want to consider one domain in which women’s writings were clearly causally influential: that concerning the questions of women’s rationality and the related matter of the education of women. In particular, one can trace a line of influence from Lucrezia Marinella18 possibly to Marie de Gournay and certainly to Anna Maria Van Schurman and from there to Bathsua Makin, and quite possiby to Mary Astell. What is particularly noteworthy here is that the causal influence is of the right kind. The later writers read the earlier works critically, criticizing some arguments, as well as refining and extending others. Marinella’s arguments in the first half of her The Nobility and Excellence of Women and the Defects and Vices of Men are all geared towards, as the title suggests, advancing claims about the excellence of women. After an argument from the nobility of the etymology of words meaning ‘woman’, Marinella offers a series of arguments which draw on Platonist texts. She begins by situating women within the ladder of being, not unlike that outlined in Pico della Mirandola’s Essay on the Dignity of Man. Insofar as women are situated within this ladder, Marinella argues, they have a degree of perfection, and she goes on to draw explicitly on the Platonic theory of Ideas to specify the kind of perfection women possess: Women embody the Ideas of beauty and goodness. Marinella does not stop with this assertion of the intrinsic nobility of women, however. She rejects the ‘common reasoning’ that “women’s souls are equal to men’s,” arguing rather that women’s souls are nobler because of women’s greater beauty, for “nobility of soul is judged from excellence of body.”19 And she continues, drawing next on Plato’s doctrine of the ascent of desire in the Symposium and Marcilio Ficino to argue that women’s beauty affords them a greater access to the nature of things and, moreover, that “the beauty of women is the way by which men who are moderate creatures are able to raise themselves to the knowledge and contemplation of divine essence.”20

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From these principles and from examples, she goes on to argue that women should be educated not only in letters but in military arts as well. While Marinella’s arguments from beauty are not taken up by those who read her, her appropriation of Platonist doctrines is. And moreover, these Platonist ideas serve the same end, that of showing that women are situated by nature to higher learning. Before considering this, however, I want to look briefly at Marie de Gournay. On the face of it Marie Le Jars de Gournay’s essay On the Equality of Men and Women (1622), does not draw on Marinella at all. The title seems directly counter to Marinella’s rejection of ‘common reasoning’. Yet the skeptical method which informs Gournay’s works can be seen as in conversation with Marinella’s work, for Gournay sees herself as trying to find the mean between two extremes, as the opening lines of her essay announce: “Most of those who take up the cause of women, opposing the arrogant preference for themselves that is asserted by men, given them full value for money, for they redirect the preference to them. For my part, I fly all extremes; I am content to make them equal to men…”21 Moreover, in one of her skeptical arguments, Gournay does advert to learned Italian women who outshine their French and English counterparts. The best explanation for this disparity, she suggests, lies in the degree and quality of the education the Italian women receive, for, she intimates, French and English women would surely surpass Italian women, just as French and English men have surpassed Italian men, if they were only better educated. While Gournay need not have Marinella in mind here, she does seem to be aware of the writings of, in particular, Venetian women of the century, and takes their very accomplishments to support a claim that women ought to be educated. Anna Maria van Schurman does address the work of Marinella, as well as that of Gournay, directly. In a letter of 18 March 1638 to André Rivet22, part of the correspondence arising from her dissertatio, On Whether a Christian Woman Should be Educated, she adverts to both Marinella’s and Gournay’s works. While she deems Marinella’s work to be well-argued, she takes issue with its style, noting that it seems to embody just the kind of vicious vanity, presumably in its display of its scholarliness, Schurman seeks to avoid. Conversely, for her, Gournay’s work, written in the humble vein of a skeptic, is a model of style, but Schurman suggests that she might well take issue with some of the conclusions.23 One can see Schurman’s own work as building on what she takes to be the successes of these two authors, while avoiding their pitfalls. For one, like Marinella, Schurman appeals to Platonic authority in arguing that women by their very nature have the resources to benefit from an education. However, she does not appeal to the Plato of the Symposium.


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Rather, in holding that all humans, men and women alike, have an innate ability to grasp the truth, which, if cultivated, leads us to virtue, she seems to draw on ideas in the Phaedo and Meno.24 In addition, Schurman pares down Marinella’s style. Indeed, she distills her argument to a spartan series of fifteen syllogisms in defense of her thesis. It thus seems we need appeal to no other authority but our own reason to see the truth of her claim. The first set of Schurman’s arguments begin from a set of general premises, for which she argues, about who is suited to the arts and sciences: those who are instilled with the principles of the arts and sciences, those who desire to study them, those who stand erect, those who yearn for an enduring occupation, those with a degree of freedom in their life, those for whom virtue is fitting. They then move to defend the minor premises that women are of the appropriate nature to studying the arts and sciences. Once she establishes that women are fit to study the arts and sciences, she move on to offer a second set of arguments which aim to show that a study of the arts and sciences is particularly conducive to a Christian woman’s being a good Christian. Such study perfects the human mind, leads one to revere God more greatly, fortifies one against heresies, teach prudence, leads to greatness of soul and provides intellectual joy, and so is opposed to ignorance. She then goes on to defend her thesis against a set of objections. Schurman can also be read as picking up a thread from Gournay’s essay. Gournay suggests that the equality of the sexes will be laid bare if men and women are given an equal education. Schurman flips the argument on its head, as she starts from a premise of the commonalities in the natures of men and women, and moves from there to defend the claim that women are fit to an education similar in many ways to that of men.25 One can see the two arguments as working together to build a strong case for women’s education: together they can be seen as a defense of a biconditional. That Schurman’s work influenced Bathsua Makin’s An Essay to Revive the Ancient Education of Gentlewomen26 is also clear. First of all, the two corresponded with one another. And not only does Makin refer to Schurman several times in the work, the basic structure of her argument is quite similar to Schurman’s. After arguing that women are educable, by citing example after example of learned women,27 she moves to follow Schurman in arguing for the suitability of education to women on the basis of a set of principles. Like Schurman, she restricts her theses about the education of women to those with sufficient means, time and talent, and from there she goes on to offer arguments from women’s nature as a rational being for her suitability to pursue a higher education. Makin then moves to offering instrumentalist justification for the education of women. Education would not only profit the women themselves, Makin claims, by keeping them occupied, helping them to achieve the knowledge that is the

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‘First Fruits of Heaven’, and providing a ‘Hedge against Heresies’ and so helping to ensure they are good Christians, it would also be beneficial to their families, as a well-educated wife is a better helper to her husband, and a better teacher of her children.28 However, it would be an oversimplification to say that Makin adopts Schurman wholesale. For one, her emphasis is different. While Schurman is concerned to educate women in order to promote their love and service to God, Makin is more concerned to ensure that women gain knowledge of, as she puts it, “things”. And among these ‘things’ she includes “Religion, the Names and Natures of Herbs, Shrubs, Trees, Mineral-Juyces, Metals, and Precious Stones; as also the Principles of Arts and Sciences before mentioned.” 29 That is, she emphasizes the content of an education in the arts and sciences itself; women should have knowledge for knowledge’s sake as well as for the benefits of its effects. In addition, Makin supplements van Schurman’s pared down arguments with lists of examples illustrating the point at issue. Here while she seems to be imitating the humanist style, akin to that of Marinella, of militating a set of authorities to one’s defense, she interestingly draws not only on historical figures but also on contemporary and near contemporary women to illustrate her point; it is here that she appeals to Schurman to illustrate the contributions of women to the arts and sciences. Moreover, her arguments go beyond Schurman’s. While with Schurman she argues that educating women will benefit both women and their families, she continues, arguing that “Women thus instructed will be beneficial to the Nation,”30 pointing to the success of the Dutch and claiming that part of their flourishing as a nation derives from the care they take in educating their women. Though Makin acknowledges the influence women can have on the political sphere, she does not go so far as to claim that women are suited to public office. Still, Schurman shies away from any claim that might even appear to take women out of the home, and so Makin’s move here is not insignificant. One might also see Astell’s Serious Proposal to the Ladies as falling within this tradition. While Astell does not appeal, to my knowledge, to any of the above authors specifically, she does seem to be addressing a question left unanswered by all their writings in defense of women’s education. While it is clear that these defenses presuppose that women are rational creatures, they do not put forward any account of the nature of rationality at issue. Astell’s proposal of a school for women begins with just that, and her account is interestingly a very Cartesian one insofar as she claims that each human being is imbued with a faculty of reason which, through cultivation, allows him or her to perceive clearly and distinctly what is true. While I have here only able to sketch out a narrative of philosophical thought about women’s rationality and the education of women, it should


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be clear that women’s writings on these topics have been causally influential. At the very least, these women read one another, and did not set about simply fleshing out the details of a predecessors view. Rather they engaged with a discussion which was very much alive for them, preserving some elements, of method as well as of content, while critiquing others, in the interest in putting forward a systematic defense of women’s education.

VI However, that we can tell a story about women’s writings having causal influence does not yet solve the problem of bringing women into the history of philosophy in any enduring way. There are two issues. For one, it seems that the cases we can most clearly make in this regard involve women influencing other women, though this may simply be an artifact of women writers being much more conscious of acknowledging their fellow women writers. Second, the philosophical issues on which these women write, and so on which they exert influence, are not what we take to be canonical. And so, if we point to this chain of influence, we run the risk of having it seem that these women are concerned simply with ‘women’s issues’ and not with the real meat of philosophical inquiry. I consider the second issue in the next section, but for now I turn briefly to the first. The fact that it seems to be the case that women were more likely to influence the writings of other women is not in itself a problem. Just because women wrote about education, and women’s education in particular, does not entail that that topic be reserved for women. Indeed, it would be interesting to look at other near contemporary writings on education to see how they fit with those just considered. Yet it still seems that we are able to weave a more tightly connected story about the women’s writings than we can if we include the men they may also have influenced. For these women were not only reading the works of other contemporary women writers and of their female predecessors, but also they acknowledge those women, and more than they do the men they might have been reading on the same topics. Their works not only are thematically unified by the philosophical questions they consider, but they are also unified in being informed by a kind of awareness of the peculiar problem of taking up the position of a woman philosopher. Though they might do so in different ways, through their writing, they all mark the fact that they are women. However, this very attention to their peculiar position also makes it all too easy to mark this line in the history of philosophy as that belonging to women philosophers. But to mark it in this way is suggests that it is something different, perhaps ‘women’s

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philosophy’ rather than philosophy proper. It is a short step from here to marginalization, and it is an even shorter step from marginalization to being forgotten once again. There is an irony here. Though the women of the early modern period are self-conscious about their position as women, the authority of their voices is remarkable. They put forward theses to be read and evaluated by all who read them, men and women alike. That is, though they may write in defense of women’s rationality and preface their arguments with some disclaimers, in the body of their works they display little hesitancy. They seem confident in their position as rational thinkers and agents. Their writings are no longer framed by the self-affirmations which characterize earlier writings by women,31 and this suggests that they were also somewhat secure in their position in their intellectual communities.32 Yet they do not hold a secure position within philosophy now. It seems that in order to bring them into contemporary discussions we must situate them historically within a community of women. While the hope for this strategy is that the authority gained in the community of women can then be carried out into the world at large, one populated by both men and women, the worry is that even if we manage to make these women’s voices heard once again, the voices will not carry.

VII Before resigning ourselves to a position which would partition the philosophical canon into men’s and women’s work, it is worth revisiting the question of women’s place within the history of modern philosophy. The fact that women’s writings have been causally influential in what would seem to be a way comparable with the way the figures in the current canon and yet are not themselves in the canon would seem to indicate that, while causal influence does help to bind our philosophical narrative, more needs to be about just what more is requisite for inclusion in the canon. So, what more is needed for a work to become part of our canon? Richard Rorty has suggested that certain works come to be particularly influential within a particular framework, one constituted by a set of philosophical questions we take to be salient. He terms geistesgeschichte a history of philosophy which aims to justify our current philosophical concerns by showing just how our philosophical ancestors have led us to ask the questions. And in particular, our ancestors fit into our geistesgeschiche, their works come to be canonical, insofar as they are interested in our philosophical questions, or at least in questions quite similar to our own.33


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If we look at the story we usually tell about early modern philosophy, it is easy to see that there are certain philosophical questions that serve as the central threads around which that story is woven. These came out in our earlier consideration of the conservative strategy for including women. We are interested in the epistemic question of how we might have knowledge of the world around us, and the associated issues of representation and sensation; we are interested in the changing conception of causation with the development of the new mechanist view of the physical world; and, we are interested in the debates around metaphysics which contributed to how the new mechanist science came to shape our understanding of the physical world, and our understanding of our very faculty of understanding that world. The figures we take as canonical, we also take to have made headway in formulating these questions, and we take their interest in these very questions to legitimate our own asking of them. There are two things to note about this way of understanding how we come to work certain thinkers and their works into our history of philosophy. First, we have already seen that a strategy of keeping the questions the same and weaving in the responses of women has its limits. Though it works to a degree, it seems to run up against the justificatory issue of explaining why we choose to include women thinkers rather than other equally (currently) less canonical figures. We might diagnose the problem to be that the questions we take as proper to philosophy are not drawn up so that the writings of women fit in naturally. Second, as Rorty himself points out, thinking of the history of philosophy in this way leads naturally to the questions: What are the questions we deem constitutive of philosophy? And why those? That is, recognizing that the figures we take to be central are a function of the questions we take to be central can lead us to recognize the contingency not only of the canon, but of the framework in which that canon is constructed. We might well tell a story of philosophy which turns on some other questions, and, in focussing on those questions rather than the ones we are currently gripped by, we might well come to take other figures and texts as instructive and thereby justificatory of our concerns. Indeed, we might find that women thinkers are among those who address these questions in the most innovative and interesting ways. So this way of understanding how the story of philosophy is bound together might well afford us a way of introducing women thinkers into our canon in an enduring way. The crucial question, however, is: Just what might these other questions—the ones which do afford a seamless inclusion of women’s writings—be? Here it seems that there are several ways to go. For one, we might look at the question of what it is to be a woman. That this is already a question on the philosophical table should be clear, for it informs a fair

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portion of contemporary feminist philosophy.34 It is interesting, however, that contemporary feminist philosophers do not, for the most part, trace the history of answers to this question in any well-developed way. While there may be occasional appeals to the troubles of Aristotelian essentialism, and the somewhat egalitarian claims of Plato’s Republic, we find few other historical markers on the way to the present. That the question of what it is to be a woman is already philosophically alive makes it a promising one to use to frame the inclusion of the texts of the women writers I have been considering. And, equally, it seems that these texts can help not only in justifying contemporary philosophical interest in this question, but also in showing just how pervasive, and indeed entrenched, the very problems feminists aim to draw attention to have been. These are two very valuable functions that situating early modern women’s writings within philosophy in this way might serve. But it is also worthwhile to note that if one were so to situate them exclusively in this way, one would be also risk separating these women and their works off from what is often called the ‘core’ areas of philosophy. And again there would be a real danger, if not of reinforcing the marginal status of feminist philosophy and so of the writings of these women, then of dividing the discipline of philosophy in two—into those concerned with what would most likely be called ‘women’s questions’ and those concerned with other questions. That is, although this strategy has the advantage of serving to justify feminist philosophical interests, in doing so it is also serving to challenge the existing canon, and one can well imagine a reactive move to marginalize this challenge. It might thus be useful to think of other ways, more consonant with the existing canon and yet in concert with this one as well, in which to situate these women’s writings. As we have just seen, many women’s writings on the nature of womankind also concern the question of a proper education, for they are also concerned with promoting women’s education. I want to suggest that looking philosophically at the question of what constitutes a good education would be an equally constructive way of situating the women writers of the early modern period within the history of philosophy. As already noted, writings by women concerning this question were causally influential. Others read their works, and did so critically. Moreover, their views on education bear a direct relation on the questions we currently take as central, and for which we turn to the early modern period for justification. For closely tied to questions of education are questions of the natures of rationality, of knowledge, and of the mind. Indeed, it is often the case that within the writings on education we find these women’s philosophy of mind. In addition, it is also the case that many currently canonical figures within the history of philosophy had something to say


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about a proper education. Descartes presents his thoughts on education in First Part of the Discourse, and one might take the Meditations and Principles (written as a textbook) to bear on this question as well. Spinoza writes his Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect. Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education is an important contribution to philosophical thought about education, and Rousseau’s Emile, as well as the first discourse, On the Sciences and the Arts, also bears directly on this question. And the British Moralists and Hume have quite a bit to say about moral education. The challenge here is to bring the question of education into the mainstream of philosophical discussion, and so to make the links between the canonical questions of epistemology and philosophy of mind and that of education through the figures we already take to be canonical.35 Yet, it also seems to me that women thinkers have contributed both substantially and valuably to the answers to this question. And what is particularly interesting about many of their writings is how intertwined they are not only with the questions in epistemology and philosophy of mind but also with the question of what it is to be a woman. Thus, it might be possible to bring this latter question into the philosophical mix, through bringing these women’s works on education to bear on current philosophical discussion. That is, we might through a consideration of these works come to integrate the question of what it is to be a woman into the more canonical former questions.

VIII In framing the history of philosophy as concerned with a set of questions that prefigure those we ourselves are invested in, however, we usually do more than simply justify our own interest in these questions. We also implicitly take ourselves to be making progress on answers to these questions. One might well ask how women thinkers fit into a narrative of progress. In considering this question, I want to revisit the issue raised earlier in this paper, of whether women’s writings on core philosophical questions were influential. Recall that the first sort of strategy for weaving women into the narrative of philosophy ran the risk of portraying women thinkers in supporting roles. Let us consider, however, just what sort of supporting roles there might be. Sometimes, working out the implications of a philosophical system does serve simply to flesh out the program. But other times these implications need to be worked out precisely because the philosophical system at issue is being contested. So working out the

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implications can serve the purpose of raising or defending against objections to the system itself. We might think this sort of supporting role to be more significant. It is noteworthy that several early modern women thinkers were engaged in just this sort of project. Elisabeth of Bohemia, in her correspondence with Descartes, and Margaret Cavendish, in both her Philosophical Letters and her Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, provide clear cases of this. Elisabeth, in her challenge to the coherence of Descartes’ account of mind-body interaction, also challenges a substance dualist metaphysics. In her letter of 16 May 1643, she asks: “for a more precise definition of the soul than that you give in your Metaphysics, that is to say, of its substance separate from its action, that is, from thought” (AT III 661) And, unsatisfied with Descartes’ response, she presses this point in her next letter. She writes: “And I aver that it would be easier for me to concede matter and extension to the soul, than the capacity to move a body and to be moved by it to an immaterial thing” (Elisabeth to Descartes, 20 June 1643, AT III 685). Elisabeth is baffled about how to understand the capacity of two really distinct substances to affect one another, and she urges Descartes to explain why she should avoid the apparently more tractable monist materialist position. I have argued elsewhere that, as the correspondence continues, Elisabeth herself struggles to answer this challenge, for in her letters one can see the outline of an alternative metaphysics. In working through the difficulties of accounting for our emotional lives within a substance dualist metaphysics, Elisabeth begins to articulate a position which, like Descartes’ own, takes nature as subject to mechanistic physical laws and thought as independent of those laws, but which, unlike Descartes’ system, avoids positing two independent substances. Margaret Cavendish’s philosophical originality is more thoroughly realized. In her Philosophical Letters, a correspondence between herself and an imagined female correspondent about the views of three leading natural philosophers, Descartes, Hobbes and Van Helmont, as well as Henry More. She also touches on other figures such as Charelton and Galileo. It is clear that she aims to set up her own natural philosophy in critiquing their conceptions of substance, the nature of the physical world, motion, and causation, among other topics. And in her Observations, she sets out her positive account in detail, developing a vitalist account of motion and causation as a clear alternative to the mechanist accounts being developed. She carries her vitalist commitment through, proposing accounts of substance and of sense perception premised on her natural philosophy. Elisabeth’s pointed objection to Descartes does gain currency today, in part because contemporary philosophers of mind find themselves in a somewhat similar position with respect to Descartes’ work. Yet her own


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positive program is neglected, no doubt because it is largely undeveloped. Cavendish’s philosophy, however, though it is well-developed, is hardly recognized at all. Perhaps part of the reason for this neglect is that vitalism did not win out. Our account of causation privileges efficient causation, and we are interested in the work in philosophy and in the sciences that strives to work out the details of that account.36 Insofar as Cavendish parts ways with such views, we take her work as not contributing to our continued efforts to make progress in working out our sort of account. The irony is that in the late century, vitalism was a viable alternative to a strict mechanist account of causation, and that fact no doubt contributed to the mechanist philosophy’s being worked out as it was. One, thus, might think that Cavendish’s work gets neglected in part because we insist on seeing ourselves as charting a direct course towards the answers we seek. This move to see ourselves as following a line leaves a set of figures by the wayside, and they are eventually are pushed so far to the side that they disappear from view. Yet still we do want to see ourselves as making some sort of progress; we do not want to be endlessly restating the obvious. I wonder then whether there is a way to think of the historiography of philosophy which involves the geistesgeschichte approach—the recognition that figures from our philosophical past serve to justify contemporary philosophical interests, and that those interests, and so the figures we take to be historically significant, are contingent—while avoiding a conception of ourselves as making linear progress. For if we did manage to conceive of things in this way, we might well manage to take the contributions of women thinkers, and indeed of other currently non-canonical figures, as more substantial. We might find some guidance in the writings of early modern thinkers themselves. In the first part of the Discourse, Descartes describes himself as having been in conversation with all the authors whose works he read, and from there making progress of a sort. Can we model the history of philosophy as a conversation? What is it to be in conversation with the authors one reads? Of course, there are many sorts of conversations, but we are interested in the good ones, or, as Scudéry puts it, speaking well with our authors. What is a good conversation? For one, a good conversation starts from a particular question or topic, and it is the hope of all parties to the conversation that, by drawing on the resources of one another, they will leave the conversation with a clearer sense of things than they had upon entering it. In a similar way, then, one looks to authors for some insight into questions or topics in which one is interested: one reads around to get a sense of the range of approaches to the issue. In this way, it should be clear, modeling the historiography of philosophy as a good conversation is akin to geistesgeschichte. While in

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conversation with other authors, we see ourselves as engaged with a common set of questions, and so we are afforded a justification of our interests. It is important to recognize, however, that one need not leave a good conversation with answers to the questions from which one began. A good conversation provides a sense of the range of possible answers and affords the resources for the grounds on which to settle on one or the other of the options.37 And though a good conversation can unsettle one’s convictions, and so leave one feeling a bit muddled, the muddle is only impetus to enter into further conversation to gain clarity. Indeed, a good conversation is not usually one in which there is unanimity of position; the best conversations seem to be those in which there is a diversity of views. For this diversity helps one to gain a critical perspective on one’s position, and so to gain insight into what is at issue. Moreover, while a conversation might lead to a consensus, it is not clear that the consensus could have been reached without some strong dissenters, or advocates of alternative positions, to put pressure on a dominant account. In fact, the view for which there is consensus, might synthesize a range of positions. And while a definitive position may emerge from conversation, it is not to say that it is the last word. New takes on the matter may emerge, and the conversation might resume. In this regard, the model of conversation affords us a different way of thinking about philosophical progress. While it may still be important to arrive at answers to our questions, these answers are not all of what is important. What is equally important is the discussion through which we arrived at those answers. This aspect of the conversational approach affords us a way of charting progress that need not be in a straight line, along a charted course leading inevitably to our conclusion. Conversations, while focused thematically, range around. The conclusion of the discussion is not inevitable. Some other position may have been settled on if the balance of discussion had tipped another way. Indeed, the introduction of new perspectives might well tip the discussion in another way. In seeing ourselves in conversation with figures from our philosophical past, we will read around, finding authors engaged with one another, and playing off one another. Looking for proponents of a range of positions, rather than looking for the line they all fall into, can allow us to get a lay of the landscape of possible answers to the questions which compel us, and so give us some perspective on the view we favor. Moreover, seeing how others have tried, and determining where they fell short, and where they seem more promising, can help us to raise and answer objections to our own view, and even to arrive at new and potentially fruitful positions and questions. These outcomes constitute making progress, but it is progress made by wending one’s way forward.


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In its overt acknowledgement of the variety of positions in play, there are other clear benefits, related to the concerns of this paper, of thinking of our relation to the history of philosophy as that of being in conversation with our philosophical ancestors. For one, this approach affords our including women thinkers in the history of philosophy, for their voices do figure in the discussion. And at the same time, it affords our including others who have been historically marginalized. We can show how not only Malebranche, More and Condillac engaged with the philosophical topics at issue, but also how the more fleeting voices of Digby and Charleton weighed in, not to mention Bayle, Desgabets, Régis and many others. And in this way we can avoid the justificatory issues that hounded the first sort of strategy considered for weaving women into the philosophical narrative. For on this view it is not so important to settle on the select few authors that led us forward to the definitive answers to our philosophical questions. Rather, what is important is to see how these philosophical questions were defined, and how consensus on answers to them began to emerge through consideration of a range of alternatives. While, on this view, we may still need to select whom we focus on, this focus can shift without interrupting the narrative flow.38 And so, while it is also important to re-start discussions around questions other than those we are currently gripped by, thinking of ourselves as in a good conversation with the history of philosophy can afford us a way of including more figures in the discussions we are already in the midst of. It is interesting to note that several of the women thinkers I have touched on here advance their views through correspondence, an interaction closely approximating conversation. I take the correspondence between Descartes and Elisabeth to be a model of what I am calling a conversation here. First, it is clear that they are both interested in a tenable philosophical position about the nature of thought in a mechanist natural world. Yet though they share this aim, they do have substantive disagreements, and Elisabeth is not one to hold her pen when she sees a flaw in Descartes’ view. Nevertheless, they listen to one another’s objections and reiterations of the point, and often times they rethink their view, refining and adjusting it to avoid the pitfalls. Moreover, they each bring something different to the exchange; for they draw on what they have read, as well as on their own experiences. Descartes is a better philosopher for his exchanges with Elisabeth, and equally, Elisabeth is pressed to articulate positions she might not otherwise have done because of her exchanges with Descartes. In addition, we have also Astell’s correspondence with Norris, and Masham’s response to it, as well, as Masham’s own correspondence with Leibniz. Indeed, we need not look to women for significant philosophical

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correspondence. Much of Descartes’ views are worked out in correspondence with many others as well as Elisabeth, and he publishes his Meditations not on their own but accompanied by a set of Objections and Replies, wherein it is clear that the later objectors read the earlier exchanges. There is a genuine conversation going on about the philosophical program in that work. The Leibniz-Clarke correspondence, as well as the Leibniz-Arnauld correspondence contains a great deal of substantive philosophical work. Equally, the exchange between Locke and Stillingfleet sheds light on Locke’s program in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding. A survey of early modern views of causation would also do well here, for here not only Descartes, Locke and Leibniz, but also the likes of Boyle, Cavendish, Charleton, Digby, and Van Helmont, were reading and responding to one another, and striving to get clear on the causal working of a natural world no longer described in Aristotelian terms. One might think that if their practices are any indication, these early modern thinkers thought of philosophy as essentially involving being in conversation. It is also interesting that several early modern women self-consciously choose conversation or correspondence as the genre in which to advance their views. Madeleine de Scudéry advances her moral philosophy through Conversations, and, as already noted, Margaret Cavendish imagines herself in correspondence with the likes of Descartes, Hobbes and Van Helmont. These women have been understood to be replicating the form of intellectual exchange most familiar to them in styling their writings in this way. But one might also wonder whether these women styled their writings as they did in part because they saw a value intrinsic to the conversational form which went missing from other kinds of intellectual exchange. Perhaps, in choosing the genre they did, they were advocating a form of intellectual interaction that, if practiced well, could well include many points of view, including those of women, but also others outside the mainstream, and so augment human knowledge.

IX I have distinguished two sorts of ways of working these women into the philosophical canon in a substantive way. On the one hand I have suggested that we might weave the writings of women, such as, say, Margaret Cavendish or Elisabeth of Bohemia, into existing narratives of philosophy of the early modern period, straight narratives of progress structured around questions of metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and epistemology. I have argued that while this strategy might be effective in the short term, it is


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unclear whether women’s writings can secure a stable place in these wellrehearsed narratives, for eventually we will need to justify including the women we do rather than some other currently non-canonical figures. On the other hand, I have suggested that we might also weave women into the narrative of early modern philosophy by adding new threads, or questions, to the canonical set—for instance, the question of female nature, or that of education. I further proposed that we think of the history of philosophy as an ongoing conversation around these questions, rather than as charting a straight course to the answers to them. In making these suggestions, I have tried to ground the inclusion of these early modern women into the philosophical canon for reasons that could be accepted by someone without strong feminist concerns. That is, I have tried to point to the philosophical questions these women address, as if philosophical questions were something different from feminist philosophical questions. I wonder, however, whether drawing this sort of distinction—what I earlier called internal and external philosophical reasons—is advisable. For many of the women of the early modern period, their philosophical concerns were very much tied up with what might be called their feminist concerns, that is, their concerns with securing their own positions as intellectual women and the position of women thinkers more generally.39 Their awareness of themselves as women informs what they write about, and it no doubt informs the positions they take up. For their problem when they were writing, just as it is now, is that of being heard. For these women, it seems their reasons for holding their views were deeply intertwined with their position as women wanting to be heard. I thus wonder if part of the problem of integrating these women into the canon of the early modern period is a result of our abstracting away from their, broadly speaking, feminist concerns as we try to weave their works into the canon. This is not to say that their feminist concerns dominate the other aspects of their philosophical positions; these authors are not feminist theorists. Rather all these different philosophical concerns are intertwined together. If I am right here, then perhaps what we need to do is bring the pieces of the puzzle back together. That is, perhaps if we see these different philosophers as not simply answering one set of philosophical questions after another, but rather as addressing these questions in the context of an overarching concern of arriving at wisdom and leading of a good life, then we will find that we have a range of subtly different views brought into the mix.40 Doing all this is not easy. However, modeling philosophy, and our relation to the history of philosophy, as a conversation can, I think, help in realizing this goal. Thinking of each author as a figure in a conversation involves recognizing that those authors have entered the discussion from a particular position, and so bring to it their own point of view. Thus,

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thinking about the claims these women thinkers argue for would involve thinking about the vantage point from which they advance those positions, in particular their position as women thinkers of a certain socio-historical period. And it would also entail recognizing that each of our interlocutors approaches the issues from a particular position as well. But recognizing that our interlocutors come from a particular postions does not demand that we focus on that position to the detriment of the content of their contributions to the discussion. We can and should attend to their philosophical claims as well. More needs to be said about how best to integrate these elements of a philosophical discussion. I cannot undertake this here, however.41 It is a task worth pursuing, however, if only because of this: Good conversations, in wanting to survey a range of views, encourage a discussants from a range of positions. In subscribing to this ethic of inclusiveness then, thinking of philosophy as a conversation can not only help to bring women into the philosophical fray, but also to effect our hearing the voices of the many others who we have heretofore neglected.42

NOTES 1

There are quite a few century catalogs of philosophers which make a point of including women, including that by Gilles Menage, The History of Women Philosophers, trans. Beatrice Zedler, (Lanham, MD: University Presses of America, 1984), which aims to record women thinkers of antiquity; and that by Thomas Stanley, The history of philosophy, (London: Humphrey Mosely and Thomas Dring, 1655-1662). Others include Jean de La Forge’s Circle of Women Scholars and Marguerite Buffet’s New Observations on the French Language... with the Elogies of Illustrious Women Scholars Ancient as well as Modern. Also, Renaissance and early modern Italian texts, especially those written by women, offer us catalogs of women who engaged in philosophy as part of their empirical arguments in defense of women’s intellectual capacities. See, for instance, Christine de Pisan’s The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. Rosalind Brown-Grant, (New York: Penguin, 1990), Henricus Cornelius Agrippa Declamation on the Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex, trans. Albert Rabil, Jr., (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), and Lucrezia Marinella, The Nobility and Excellence of Women and the Defects and Vices of Men, trans. Anne Dunhill, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). There are scattered efforts to include women in philosophical history in the and centuries, including those by Hedengrahn at the beginning of the and Tennemann and the beginning of the 19th. Hegel and Charles Renouvier mention women but do not give a developed account of their thought. Victor Cousin in his Course of Philosophy includes several women. And M. Lescure writes The Women Philosophers in the late century. Foucher de Careil is responsible for bringing Elisabeth’s correspondence with Descartes to light, as well as the relations between Descartes and Christina and Leibniz and Elisabeth’s sister and niece Sophie and Sophie Charlotte. Charles Adam’s Descartes: ses amitiés feminines (Paris: Boivin, 1937) is very limited in scope, and it is not clear that he counts these ‘amitiées’ as philosophers. In the century, Mary Ellen Waithe’s four volume work A History of Women Philosophers,


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(Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1987-1991) goes a long way to rectifying the current situation. See Jonathan Rée “Philosophy and the History of Philosophy,” in Philosophy and Its Past, ed. J. Rée, M. Ayers and A. Westoby, (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1978) and Eileen O’Neill, “Disappearing Ink: Early Modern Women Philosophers and Their Place in History” in Philosophy in a Feminist Voice, ed. Janet Kourany, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), for interesting discussions of the changing styles of the historiography of philosophy. This account only touches the surface and owes much to the more complete bibliography offered by O’Neill. 2 Sometimes, the earlier figures of Mary Wollstonecraft (A Vindication of the Rights of Women) and Harriet Taylor Mill (Enfranchisement of Women and Correspondence with John Stuart Mill) work their way in, but still they appear as oddities in the crowd of men. Mary Warnock, in her Women Philosophers, (New York: Everyman, 1996), identifies all of 19 women philosophers, only four of which, Anne Conway, Catherine Cockburn, Mary Wollstonecraft and Harriet Martineau write prior to the century. 3 Here are two very general reasons holding this view. First, though now it might well appear to many students of philosophy, as well as many philosophers, that within the history of European thought only a somewhat homogeneous bunch of men has engaged in philosophical inquiry, this is far from being the case. Insofar as we take a goal of our history of philosophy to represent its past adequately, the absence of women from this history is a problem. Having this goal need not entail that we expect ever to recover the past perfectly, but it does seem to entail that our histories not be so off the mark that they present a distorted picture of who was capable of being a philosopher. Second, the very existence of these women and their work demonstrates that there were a range of people, of somewhat different stations, with somewhat different perspectives, with an interest in philosophy. And showing that this was so in the past can help to encourage students from a variety of backgrounds and interests to feel welcome to engage in and pursue the study of philosophy. So, if one has a more immediate end of increasing the diversity of those engaged in philosophy now, as, I would think, most of us do, one might think that there is something to be gained by helping the women philosophers of the past regain their place in the history of philosophy. 4 See Margaret Atherton, Women Philosophers of the Early Modern Period, (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994) and Eileen O’Neill, Women Philosophers of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: A Collection of Primary Sources, 2 vol., (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). See O’Neill, “Disappearing Ink” for an invaluable bibliography of primary and secondary sources. See also Hypatia’s Daughters: Fifteen Hundred Years of Women Philosophers, ed. Linda Lopez McAlister, (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996), for critical articles on a range of figures. 5 Undoubtedly, the following list is incomplete. Mary Astell, Political Writings, ed. Patricia Springborg, (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), and A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, ed. Patricia Springborg, (London/Brookfield,VT: Pickering and Chatto, 1997). Margaret Cavendish, Observations on the Experimental Philosophy, ed. Eileen O’Neill, (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Description of a new world, called the Blazing World, and other writings, ed. Kate Lilley, (New York: NYU Press, 1992); Paper Bodies, A Margaret Cavendish Reader, ed. Sylvia Bowerblank and Sara Mendelson, (Peterborough, Ont./Orchard Park, NY: Broadview Press, 2000). Mary Chudleigh, Poems and Prose of Mary Chudleigh, ed. Margaret J.M. Ezell, (New York: Oxford, 1993). Anne Conway, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modem Philosophy, ed. Allison Coudert and Taylor Corse, (Cambridge/New York; Cambridge University Press, 1996). Moderata Fonte, The Worth of Women, ed and trans. Virginia Cox, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). Marie le Jars de Gournay, Preface to the Essays of

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Michel de Montaigne / by his adoptive daughter, Marie Le Jars de Gournay, transl. Richard Hillman & Colette Quesnel, (Tempe, AZ: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1998), and Apology for the Woman Writing and other works, ed and transl by Hillman and Quesnel, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); the latter includes the essay ‘On the Equality of Men and Women’. Catherine Macaulay, On Burke’s Refelctions on the French Revolution, (Poole/Washington, DC: Woodstock Books, 1997); Letters on Education with Observations on Religious and Metaphysical Subjects, ed. Gina Luria, (New York: Garland, 1974). Mary Shepherd. Philosophical Works of Lady Mary Shepherd, ed. Jennifer McRobert, (Bristol, England/Sterling, VA: Thoemmes, 2000). Anna Maria van Schurman, Whether a Christian Woman Should Be Educated, ed and trans. Joyce Irwin, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). Catherine Trotter Cockburn’s works are forthcoming from Broadview Press. I have already mentioned the work by Marinella and more are forthcoming in the University of Chicago Press series The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe, including a new translation of the Elisabeth-Descartes correspondence, Madeleine de Scudéry’s Orations and Rhetorical Dialogues, selected writings of Emilie du Chatelet, selected writings of Jaqueline Pascal, letters of the Duchesse de Montpensier, and selections from the writings of Gabrielle Suchon. There are recent editions of works by Marie de Gournay, Emilie du Chatelet, Olympe de Gouges and Gabrielle Suchon in French. See fn.7 below. 6 O’Neill, “Disappearing Ink,” p.43. 7 Here is one I find particularly compelling: While there is a new edition of Suchon’s Traité de la morale et la politique in French, there has yet to be a translation into English. Gabrielle Suchon, Traité de la morale et de la politique: la liberté (Paris: Des Femmes, 1984) and La contrainte: Traité de la morale et de la politique, premiere partie, deuxieme section (Paris: Indigo & Coté femmes, 1999). Also reissued is Du célibat volontaire, ou, La vie sans engagement. Paris: Indigo & Coté femmes, 1994. I am not sure what the forthcoming translation of Suchon will include. Se fn. 5 above. Other works have been re-issued in French but there is as yet no English translation: Emilie du Chatelet’s translation of Isaac Newton’s Principia into French, Principes mathematiques de la philosophie naturelle, traduction de la Marquise du Chatelet, (Paris: Blanchard, 1966) and her Lettres d’Amour au Marquis de Saint Lambert, ed. Anne Soprani, (Paris: Paris-Mediterranée, 1997); Olympes de Gouges, Oeuvres Completes, (Montauban: Cocagne, 1993) and Ecrits politiques, (Paris: Côté-femmes, 1993). Again, see O’Neill, “Disappearing Ink.” Most of the primary sources she mentions are long out of print. There are few if any contemporary re-issuings of German and Spanish women writers, perhaps because there were few. Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz is an exception here. 8 Atherton, Women Philosophers, provides a handy anthology of selections from the works of Princess Elisabeth, Margaret Cavendish, Anne Conway, Damaris Masham, Mary Astell, Catherine Trotter Cockburn, and Lady Mary Shepherd. While the works of Cavendish and Shepherd are available (though Shepherd is quite pricey), and Cockburn’s works and Elisabeth’s correspondence will soon be available, I am not aware of when the writings of Masham will be. Whole works are sometimes available on microfilm or through new electronic databases of image files. 9 Richard Rorty, “The Historiography of Philosophy: Four Genres” in Philosophy in History, ed. R. Rorty, JB Schneewind, and Q. Skinner, (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984). 10 Rorty, “Four Genres,” 62-63. 11 Rorty, “Four Genres,” 62 12 This approach is akin to what Mary Ellen Waithe has called “adding women and stirring” in her “On Not Teaching the History of Philosophy,” Hypatia, 4, 1, (Spring 1989), 133.

THE PLACE OF WOMEN IN EARLY MODERN PHILOSOPHY 13

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By drawing a distinction between internal and external reasons here, I do not intend to apply that feminist reasons for including women are not philosophical. The reasons are not internal and external to philosophy as such. Rather, the reasons may be internal or external to the treatment of a particular philosophical issue – say, an account of causation, the representationality of ideas or the nature of woman. At the end of this paper, I reconsider this distinction. 14 Their correspondence continues through Descartes’ life, and they turn to discuss details of Descartes’ physics, questions of ethics, politcal philosophy, and the passions, among other matters. 15 Indeed, Atherton’s anthology of excerpts of writings of seventeenth century women philosophers seems geared to facilitating this sort of approach. 16 To make the return to this justificatory issue more compelling I need only broaden the list of questions: Why should we read Elisabeth’s letters to Descartes rather than the exchanges between Descartes and Arnauld, or Descartes and Mersenne, or Descartes and Gassendi? Why should we read Catherine Trotter’s and Damaris Masham’s defense of Locke rather than, say, the Stillingfleet-Locke exchange or perhaps Condillac’s version of empiricist psychology? Why not include Bayle, someone who wrote on those who preceded him and who was read by those who followed him? 17 See O’Neill, “Disappearing Ink,” p. 34-39. 18 The discussions of women’s rationality and the education of women in the early modern period follow on from the querelle des femmes, or ‘debate on women’, which began in the century with vernacular declamations against women, reified most famously in Jean de Meung’s portion of the Roman de la Rose, and the response to such defamation by Christine de Pisan in her Book of the City of Ladies and other works in which she attests to women’s intellectual abilities as well as their moral virtue. These two figures in this literary exchange come to represent each of the two camps in what comes to be a fervent debate about the relative worth of men and women. For an overview of the querelle des femmes see Joan Kelly, “Early Feminist Theory and the Querelle des Femmes: 1400-1789” in Women, History, Theory: The Essays of Joan Kelly, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp 65-109. This debate was no doubt tied to the shifting ground in Renaissance philosophy, as defenders of the intellectual superiority of men draw on Aristotle and Aristotelian philosophy in support of their views, while the defenders of women began to draw on Plato and neoplatonism in support of their positions. Nevertheless, these texts, both denigrating and laudatory of women, were largely polemics against the opposing position accompanied by simple assertions of the positive claims being made. The rhetorical ground seems to shift a bit, however, with the Lucrezia Marinella’s work of 1600, though it is still essentially reactive -- she is responding to Guiseppe Passi’s The Defects of Women and matches his presentation point by point. 19 Marinella, Nobility, p.57. 20 Marinella, Nobility, p.62. 21 Gournay, ‘On the Equality of Men and Women’, in Apology for the Woman Writing, p.75. 22 André Rivet was a professor of theology at Leiden with whom Schurman corresponded and who encouraged her in her work. While supportive of Schurman, he saw her as an exception to the female norm. 23 Schurman, Christian Woman, p.55. 24 Both Marinella and Schurman draws on the notion of intellectual virtue presented in Book X of Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics to defend their claims that the education of women can only contribute to their virtue.

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Schurman does not go so far as to claim that men and women have the same natures, nor does she claim that men and women should receive the same education. 26 Bathsua Makin, An Essay to Revive the Antient Education of Gentlewomen, (Los Angeles: Augustan Reprint Society, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, Publication No. 202, 1980). 27 It is possible that here she is influenced by empirical the arguments of humanist writings and perhaps Marinella. 28 Makin, 25ff. 29 Makin, 34. While she does not do so explicitly, she seems here to be drawing on humanist scientific writings which seem focused on natural history in a similar way. Interestingly, the second half of Moderata Fonte’s The Worth of Women assumes this same natural historical approach to the education of women. 30 Makin, 28. 31 If one looks back to women’s writings within the thick of the querelle des femmes one sees a marked difference. In works like Christine de Pisan’s The Book of the City of Ladies, and even as late as Moderata Fonte’s The Worth of Women, there is a self-conscious recognition that effective writing, or rather effective thinking, requires a community of interlocutors with whom one can play out one’s ideas, and who, even in providing a critical perspective, acknowledge one as a reasonable being. Pisan’s book begins with its heroine alone in her study, demoralized by what she finds written about women. With these books as her only authority, she suffers a loss of confidence, which would seem to prevent her doing any work of her own. But very quickly Pisan provides her heroine with the antidote to her insecurity. The heroine, Christine herself, is visited by the three ladies of Reason, Justice and Virtue, who in turn set out for her an array of women who have succeeded in their various intellectual and artistic endeavors. The idea is one which is not novel to contemporary feminist thinkers. In order for Christine to be able to succeed in her own endeavors, she must have confidence in herself, and this confidence is to be gained by through the recognition of a community. The community Pisan imagines is one of women: there are not only the three visionaries, and the historical figures they remark upon, but there is also the city of ladies that Christine builds within the book, and the one that presumably de Pisan is building through her book. Her method suggests, at the very least, that for women to overcome the pernicious ways in which they are represented, there needs to be positive examples of the successes and achievements of women; there needs to be the positive experience of women governing themselves, and doing so well; and there needs to be the individual’s experience of her own authority. And moreover, it would seem she is arguing, these needs can best be met through a community composed only of women. Once the work of this community is begun, however, these women can then venture out into the world at large. Fonte’s work suggests something similar. She presents us with seven women, all of different age, rank, and marital status, who enter into a two day conversation with one another, first about who is more worthy and virtuous men or women, and second about various topics in what can only be described as natural history. While the work is couched as a debate about the relative merits of the sexes, the discussion ends up being rather lopsided, and threatens to degenerate into an harangue against men. It nevertheless does exhibit women’s capacity for argument: those charged to defend men present reasons in their defense, but these are rebutted by the women charged with defending women. Moreover, reading the work as simply polemical cannot explain the scientific enterprise of the second day. It seems rather that the rather frank and open discussion of the first day, in which the women validate their own worth, while denigrating the way men have represented the female sex, sets up, and perhaps enables, the scientific discussion. Again, the women form a community amongst themselves, recognize each other as intelligent, reasoning beings through engaging in a


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heated debate, and then through this recognition undertake the serious intellectual investigations proper to science. Again, in order to realize their native intelligence, that intelligence must be acknowledged, and those most suitable to acknowledging it are not the men who have given them short shrift, but their fellow women. It is only once they have practiced reasoning with one another, in debate, and practiced the art of scientific investigation by observing the natural world around them, that they, at the end of the second day, can venture back out into the larger world and engage in intellectual commerce with men as well. 32 This is not to say that they did not come under attack. Gournay and Makin were certainly mocked. 33 Rorty, “Four Genres,” 57. 34 Contemporary feminist writers on essentialism include Simone de Beauvoir, Judith Butler, Luce Irigaray, Iris Marion Young, Sally Haslanger, Elizabeth Spelman and Charlotte Witt, along with many others. 35 A recent collection of essays edited by Amelie Rorty, Philosophers on Education, (New York/London: Routledge, 1998) takes a step in this direction. Yet though the collection offers a perspective on philosophers’ views of education extending from Socrates to the present, there are no essays on Marinella, Gournay, van Schurman or Makin, let alone Mary Astell’s Serious Proposal for the Ladies or Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women, or indeed, on the views of any other women philosophers. 36 And so for this reason, perhaps, we take greater interest in misguided mechanists like Hobbes. 37 As Descartes puts it: “conversing with those of past centuries is like travelling. It is good to know something of the customs of various peoples, so that we may judge our own more soundly...” (AT VI 6, CSM I 113-14). 38 To switch to an acting metaphor, we will be thinking of the history of philosophy as an ensemble piece rather than as a star vehicle. 39 It is not clear that these women recognize all women as of the same class. Their writings and arguments are directed at a privileged class of women whose responsibilities permit them the resources for an education. 40 A recent article by Michèle LeDoeuff (“Feminism Is Back in France – Or Is It?” ed. Penelope Deutscher, Hypatia, 15,4 (2000), 243-255) seems to effect this integration successfully, while at the same time bringing a woman in the history of philosophy to bear on contemporary philosophical discussion. LeDoeuff begins by citing a discussion between Benoîte Groult and Josyane Savigneau, the editor in chief of Le Monde des Livres, in which the “two women who are more or less sympathetic to feminism agree that women don’t think philosophically yet, and have not done so in the recent or distant past, except for [Hannah] Arendt and possibly [Simone] Weil” (Le Doeuff 2000, 247). She then uses this claim to make a point about the tension between ‘state-handled’ feminism and the active citizen, who thinks for herself and makes choices for herself. It is this active citizen who, LeDoeuff claims, lies at the core any feminist initiative, indeed at the core of any activist cause. LeDoeuff makes her point through the work of Gabrielle Suchon. For not only does Suchon provide evidence of a woman ‘thinking philosophically’ in the ‘distant past’, she also makes a point which is very much the forerunner of that Le Doeuff herself wants to make. Suchon argues in her Traité de la morale et de la politique, that political freedom and reason go hand in hand. For having reason entails that one is able to inquire, to reflect on one’s experiences, to change one’s mind, and potentially that of another reasonable being. Reasoning thus depends on a certain ‘inner freedom’, and this freedom, if properly developed, can lead to a political community in which an ‘exterior’ freedom, that is a freedom to develop one’s mind, reason or inner freedom, is the guiding ideal. Good

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government, then, is one which promotes in its citizens not only a capacity for reflection but a vigilance to inquire and reflect on how one is living. Le Doeuff’s point is one very much invested in the present. She is concerned to diagnose the state of feminism in France at the turn of the new century. But in making this point she turns back to the past, not to more familiar Enlightenment figures, such as Rousseau, who also ties good citizenship to a good education and a good education to that promoting a capacity to think for oneself, but to a woman thinker. And this woman thinker, Suchon, has made the very point credited to someone like Rousseau, a good fifty years before Rousseau. Indeed, Le Doeuff speculates, Rousseau read and then ‘hijacked’ Suchon. Intertwined are a political point, a philosophical point, a point about intellectual history, and a feminist point about the place of women in philosophy and in the history of philosophy. And Suchon’s philosophical position is equally presented as intertwined with the set of concerns in which it was developed. And in reaching back to the past in this way, I want to suggest, LeDoeuff invests Suchon with canonical status. 41 See Michèle Le Doeuff, Hipparchia’s Choice: an essay concerning women, philosophy, etc. Trans. Trista Selous. (Oxford/Cambridge,MA: Blackwell, 1991) for a very rich discussion of these sorts of issues. 42 I began to articulate these thoughts in conversations with Kate Abramson, Donald Ainslie, Margaret Atherton, Daniel Garber, Michael Jacovides, Michael Rosenthal and Todd Ryan. I thank them for lending their ears. Jutta Sperling introduced me to the thought of Italian early modern women, as well as the historian’s perspective on these discussions. Working with her was an invaluable experience. I also thank the editors of this volume, Lilli Alanen and Charlotte Witt, for the opportunity to put those thoughts in writing. And I especially thank Eileen O’Neill not only for all her work on century women philosophers and her support, but also for the many very stimulating discussions on this topic.

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